Grammar is beautiful, honestly.

[cosmolinguist]

My Arabic teacher wrote "Plural Patterns" on the board and a few of us groaned.

Her too, I think. "I've put this off for a while," she said, "but we have to do it."

So far, we've learned the rule for pluralizing "regular" forms in Arabic, and more recently that there are a lot of irregular forms. We've learned two patterns (there are about seventy irregular patterns, apparently). Today we learned two more, but I shouldn't have groaned because I also learned something really cool about Arabic.

Let's see if I understand it well enough to explain it.

Arabic is a really orderly language. Words about similar concepts tend to be grouped together by the fact that they share three root consonants. "Book" and "write" and "desk", and so on. We knew this already.

What I learned today is that while you have to be an expert to understand why a word will get a particular pattern, there is a clever way to describe it once you do know. The letters ف-ع-ل (which I've written here with dashes in between so you can see there are three of them; otherwise Arabic letters are all joined up, like cursive handwriting) is used as a kind of example word (if you write them all together it is a word, فعل). So you can take this example word and add or change the vowels however a pattern dictates that you should. It can end up looking like افعال or فُعول (those are patterns we've learned so far), and the resulting word is used as the name of that particular pattern, all of that group of irregular words.

Of course my class were horrified by this, and panicking, and they kept asking stuff like "is this going to be on the test?" (our teacher doesn't know yet, which is one reason she's telling us, because it might be) and "can you explain that again?" but I was delighted by it right away. After a class full of lots of new words, and revision exercises that made me feel like I never learned anything in the first place, this was my favorite part of an otherwise dispiriting day.

I'm not explaining it as well here, but when the teacher was telling us this, I could see what an elegant way it was to describe the inelegant system of irregulars. For once something made sense and over the bewilderment of my class I was anticipating features of it. I felt like I was in a movie where suddenly someone gets a genius mathematical/scientific idea and draws on windows about it. Yeah I know it wasn't my idea; I was just having the barest bones explained to me of something Arabic grammarians sorted out in the Middle Ages, but it felt pretty good anyway.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Right after I wrote this, my teacher shared a video that explains this better, starting at 11:15. If anyone actually wants to see what I'm trying to talk about you can watch a few minutes of that. :)

[belleweather]

Did they give you the table? We have a giant verb formation table that has all the forms and how to make them on the wall, and I LOVE it. Then you get into the relationships between the forms (like, 2 and 5 are often the reflexive forms of one another) and it gets really awesome. Except... we drill them, and it makes my head hurt.

[cosmolinguist]

We're only a beginners class and we've just about learned everything we're gonna learn for this year so no table for me. I would love that too, though; I'm one of those people who wants to know how the grammar works. I can't learn as well from the Duolingo kind of "here's lots of vocabulary and we'll never tell you that the ending or the article changes here for the accusative case!" approach. But I appreciate everybody else seems to hate learning this way so I'm never going to get to do it. ;)

[sir_guinglain]

Languages are fascinating, but this is part of why I'm too lazy/resistant to change to learn them...

[alatefeline]

Way cool! Spanish conjugations do a similar thing, where you can describe less-common verbs by which common regular pattern (there are three of those) or common irregular verb (a dozen or so needed for functional conversational fluency) they 'follow', and I had a very happy moment when I realized just *how many* words I could now do by making them like an example. https://www.fluentu.com/blog/spanish/spanish-irregular-verbs/ But there isn't actually a special word that just means 'change words shaped like X following pattern Y' and I think that's an AWESOME thing that Arabic plural grammar has come up with.

[cosmolinguist]

It is awesome! Because Arabic is considered so important as the language the Quran was written in, I think a ton of energy was put into it not only as a kind of devotion but also when Islam started spreading and people had to learn Arabic in order to read their holy book. So it seems to have a lot of explicitly useful stuff like this in a way speakers of English are not used to. :)

[jesse_the_k]

oooh. nifty story, nifty insight.

[momentsmusicaux]

So it's like there's a word 'thingy' that doesn't mean anything, and you say things like 'thingier', 'thingiest' (but with plurals), and then that's the name of that form?

That is really cool!

[cosmolinguist]

It does mean something, basically "to do" (not actually because Arabic doesn't have infinitives, but inasmuch as فعل is the "dictionary form," like we'd look up "do" in the dictionary if we wanted to find out about "did" or "does"). But it's not a word used much in everyday language according to my teacher, a native Arabic speaker. So it is kind of a special word set aside for this purpose is, or that's the impression I got anyway.

[sfred]

That is very cool :-)