Ahlan wa sahlan! In this video, I'm going to talk about using demonstrative
pronouns, اسم الإشارة, with إضافة structures, and how they work
together. I'm going to assume that you have a working understanding of both
اسم الإشارة and definite إضافة and how they work. If
you would like a review, we do have separate videos on both of those
subjects that you can refer back to. So as you know, in a definite إضافة, the
first noun is definite by definition, because it's part of the إضافة
structure. But it's never going to take a definite marker like الـ. Never ever.
For kind of the same reason, it also can't be preceded by any demonstrative pronouns
like هذا or هذه he or هؤلاء 'this, that, those.' What we need to do
instead is put them after the entire إضافة at the end of the phrase. So here I
have a couple of simple إضافات that we can use. غرفت النوم, 'the
bedroom,' literally 'the room of sleep,' قضية المال, 'the issue of money,' this
abstract issue of money, طلاب صفنا 'the students of our class,' or "our classes'
students" and جامعتنا--we're going to talk about that last one a little
more in a bit. So if we want to say 'this bedroom,' we might be tempted to put هذه
at the beginning of this phrase, but what we need to do in order to conform to the
rules of Arabic, is to put it instead at the end, because it can't come before
the إضافة, so we need instead to say غرفة النوم هذه
Or 'this issue of money'--here again, قضية is feminine with a 'taa marbuuta,'
so is غرفة, and since they're the nouns that we're referring to, we would
need to use هذه again: قضية المال هذه, 'this issue of money,' or 'these
students of our class,' طلاب صفنا.
طلاب is a human plural, so we would need
to use the human plural version, هؤلاء, طلاب صفنا هؤلاء
'these students
of our class,' and جامعتنا is interesting. You might be looking at it
and thinking 'well if we have an إضافة then we must have multiple nouns,' but
technically, according to Arab grammarians of old, this noun, the possessive pronoun
at the end, is serving as a noun. So you've been using إضافات all this time.
Every time you attach a possessive pronoun to a noun,
technically, we're saying something like 'the University of us,' meaning, of course,
'our University,' but because technically it is an إضافة, we still can't put the
demonstrative pronoun first. We have to put it at the end to say 'this university
of ours,' جامعتنا هذه. Note that all of these are phrases,
they're not really sentences, we don't have a complete idea. If we did put the
demonstrative pronouns before these phrases, then we would have something
that's approaching a nominative sentence, so all these are إضافة
phrases, not really sentences, but if we put the demonstrative pronoun here,
and said هذه هي غرفة النوم,
'this is the bedroom.' In formal Arabic, we
would need to have kind of a 'dummy pronoun' connecting these two. In spoken
Arabic, we could get away with saying دي غرفت النوم or هادي غرفة النوم
and just rely on the intonation, so remember that if you're writing
something down. Or 'this is an issue of money,' we could say هذه هي قضية المال
or 'these are the students of our class,' we could say هؤلاء هم طلاب صفنا
Or هذه هي جامعتنا. So there, in green, here,
we would have complete sentences.
When you're approaching a text and you see a demonstrative like this, that comes
after a string of nouns, it's likely to refer to an إضافة that precedes it,
but if you're reading a text and you see a structure like this, with the
demonstrative pronoun followed by a separate subject pronoun, it's likely to
be the مبتدأ of a جملة اسمية, right? The subject that is then going to have a
predicate.