Ahla wa sahla!
Right now, we're going to talk about an Arabic verb called تَمَّ,
which literally means 'to be completed,' but is often used in the sense of
'taking place,' or 'happening.' Remember that 'shadda' indicates two 'miims.' There's sort of a relationship between the verb تمّ and تمام,
which means
'complete,' but we can also use it to say 'is everything alright? Is everything okay?' تمام؟
'Are you complete?' is literally sort of what we're saying when we ask that.
تمّ tends to be used a lot in
journalistic and
descriptive writing to refer to events that have happened, or will happen, and
It's usually followed by a مصدر, one of those verbal nouns. So if we wanted to say, for example
'the meeting took place on Thursday,'
we could phrase that in Arabic as
تمّ الاجتماع في يوم الخميس.
Since we know it's good style in Arabic to begin a
sentence with a verb, and since it is a verb that tells us, along with our مصدر,
what has happened, we tend to see it a lot, especially, at the beginning of news articles.
Another example: if we wanted to say, perhaps if we were writing a biography of someone, and
to say 'the play was written in
Beirut in
1993,' or whatever the case may be, we could avoid the use of the passive tense by again relying on
تمّ plus a مصدر. So if the play was written in Beirut,
تمّتْ كتابة المسرحية في بيروت.
Here, تمّ is conjugated in the feminine, because كتابة, the مصدر, is the subject of
تمّ. The writing
of the play was completed in the city of Beirut.
The meeting was completed, was held, on
Thursday.
We could also use it, and you do see this occasionally, to refer to events that are going to happen in the future.
So if we wanted to say 'The interview will happen in the director's office,' and give it sort of a journalistic tone,
we could say
ستتمّ المقابلة في مكتب المدير.
Where again,
تتمّ
is conjugated in the feminine because the
meeting, the 'interviewing,' the interview, this مصدر is grammatically feminine, with a 'taa marbuuTa.'
For that reason, because we see تمّ mostly followed by an abstract noun or a مصدر,
we don't tend to see the verb conjugated for many other subjects, other than
هي or هي. Even if we were referring to a series of events, or a series of meetings,
non-feminine plurals, of course, in formal Arabic are treated in the sentences' grammar as though
they were feminine singular. So
تتمّ، يتمّ، تمَّ، تمَّتْ
in the past, those tend to be really
all of the iterations that we are going to encounter in most
journalistic or
biographical or expository writing.
It doesn't always
occur in journalism though. It can occur in colloquial speech. One
context in which I've encountered it is the title of an old Egyptian movie, some kind of romantic comedy, called
in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic
الجوازة دي مش ممكن تتمّ!
Or, maybe it was مش لازم تتمّ.
Which
Is a little bit tricky to translate.
But we might say "This Wedding Can't Take Place!" or "This Wedding Mustn't Be Allowed to Happen!"
Where again the Egyptian Colloquial word for wedding, جوازة, is feminine. الجوازة دي, this wedding,
مش لازم تتمّ. It, the wedding, the grammatically feminine wedding, can't occur. So while we do see it a lot in journalism,
we will also hear it out on the streets.
And it's a nifty little structure that gives you that much more flexibility when you're doing your own expository writing
in Arabic.