Ahla wa sahla! Right now,
I want to talk about a structure that we can use for talking about things
not being, or talking about the absence of something. In Arabic, we call this structure
لا النافية للجنس, which translates literally as 'the Laa that
negates
the genus,' or the 'laa' that negates the class. When we're talking about an absolute lack of something.
'There is no X.'
The construction itself is pretty simple. We take the لا and then we follow it with with a noun that we're negating,
the noun that there's nothing of. That noun being negated
always needs to be singular,
It always needs to be indefinite, and it's going to take a منصوب case ending without تنوين, just a single 'fatha.'
So for example the word أحد in Arabic means someone or anyone,
But if we wanted to talk about 'no one at all,'
we could say
لا أحدَ
Of course in most speech and in most texts, we're not going to see that 'fatha,' but as diligent students of Arabic
we know that it's there.
We get a lot of useful expressions by using this لا النافية للجنس. For example if we wanted to
use
حاجة--حاجة is a word that means 'need,'
as in 'a need' to do something or 'a need' for something. So if we wanted to say 'oh, there's no need,'
'there's no need for you to do what you're doing,' or 'there's no need to discuss this,' we could say
لا حاجةَ no need for discussion, for example,
لا حاجةَ للنقاش.
لِـ is a preposition that often follows حاجة.
Or بُدّ is a word that kind of means
'escape or avoiding,' so we can use لا النافية للجنس to derive an expression that basically means 'it is
necessary to do something.' There is no avoiding
doing something. So if we wanted to say, for example
'we have to study for the test,' we could use this structure
لا بدّ أن ندرس
Meaning "there's no avoiding study." There's no getting around it, we have to do it, basically.
We also get some stock phrases that are used in religious contexts. For example, you might have heard someone say
لا حولَ ولا قوةَ إلا بالله
Meaning
"there is no power or ability except through
God." Sometimes people use this
in speech as an expression of dismay, right?
We're powerless, God is the only one who can do something. And here is a case where even in colloquial speech,
because it's taken from a very formal context, you're likely to hear people pronounce
those case endings, because it's a
fixed phrase. There's also a famous poem by the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish
which is called
sort of, "Nothing Pleases Me." "Nothing Makes Me Happy." So to say "nothing at all,"
you could say لا شيءَ يعجبني
And that's لا النافية للجنس!
We see it all over the place, in spoken and formal written contexts, and
Now, you know how to talk about things 'not being' in Arabic.