Marhaban! Right now, we're going to talk about verbal sentences in Arabic, or what we call
الجملة الفعلية.
فعلية is a 'nisba' adjective, like others we've seen, that
comes from the word فعل, which means 'verb' in Arabic. So here we have some examples.
لا أعرف كل الطلاب في الصف.
'I don't know all of the students in the class.'
يكتبون الرسائل إلى أفراد العائلة.
'They write letters to the members of the family.'
يعمل الأستاذ في جامعة "سميث".
'The professor works at Smith College.'
تشاهد زوجتي التلفزيون في المساء.
'My wife watches television in the evening.' Now, as we can see, the subject of the
verb, the فاعل, as we say in Arabic, which literally means the 'doer,' can be
contained within the verb. Here are a couple of examples. We know from the
conjugations that أعرف refers to أنا, I am talking about myself, or
يكتبون refers explicitly to هم, right And in other cases we can put
the فاعل after the فعل, the verb. الفعل, and here we have الفاعل.
Note that this is something that we cannot do in English. We can't
put our subject after our verb, but in Arabic, it's very common and especially in
formal, written Arabic, it's considered most elegant style, if we need to express
a specific فاعل, right? But we don't always. لا أعرف, I'm always referring to
me, so there's no need to put أنا there. We could do it, there's no rule explicitly
against it, it sounds a little bit redundant, unless I want to refer
specifically to me, but I could say
أنا لا أعرف كل الطلاب في الصف.
But if I do that, I'm no longer working with a جملة فعلية, because I'm not beginning my
sentence with a فعل, a verb, I'm beginning it with this pronoun, أنا.
We could also, for example, take this last sentence, تشاهد زوجتي التلفزيون في المساء
Let's work through this, and identify what we have. تشاهد
that's a verb, a فعل. زوجتي, she's the one who's doing the
watching. She is the فاعل, right?
Again no prohibition against taking this word and turning this into a جملة اسمية.
But then we're going to use different terminology to analyze the
sentence, right? We remember that we have words that are roughly equivalent to
'subject' and 'predicate,' so if we were going to use this structure and turn it
into a جملة اسمية, زوجتي would be the مبتدأ, the
subject, roughly, and تشاهد التلفزيون, all of that would be الخبر.
Usually, we have some flexibility. With many many sentences, we could go
with جملة اسمية or جملة فعلية, but the the context in which we analyze 40 00:04:09,939 --> 00:00:00,000 them is going to be different.