dhimmi no more and Arabic 101 part 5

Submitted by Keith Williams (United States), Nov 26, 2008 at 06:29

Hi,

I enjoy our Arabic lessons. Thanks for looking out but,

dhimmi no more wrote:

>>Huwa rajil jahil jida (sic) Right? Or he man ignorant much (sic) Right? well this is very poor syntax not just in Arabic but also in English as you can see<<

Come on dhimmi, that is not right, you can do better. You know that the verb comes before the subject in arabic so translate it correctly and put the subject before the verb when you translate it into english, he is a very ignorant man.

Well, I could be wrong but in my schooling I was taught that (hadha) was a demonstrative pronoun and not a personal pronoun. That is why I used the personal pronoun (huwa). There are two demonstratives (asmāʼu al-ʼišārati), near-deictic ('this') and far-deictic ('that').

• hādha (هذا), f. hādhihi (هذه), pl. hāʼulāʼi (هؤلاء ) 'this, these'
• dhālika (ذلك), f. tilka (تلك), pl. ʼulāʼika (أولئك) 'that, those'

Also, word order in Arabic is different from english. Classical Arabic tends to prefer the word order VSO (verb before subject) rather than SVO (subject before verb).

Also, you can but you don't have to use inna.

The subject of a sentence can be topicalized and emphasized by moving it to the beginning of the sentence and preceding it with the word inna. Examples are "innaka anta jamīlun" "YOU are beautiful" or "inna s-samā'a zarqā'u" "THE SKY is blue".

So in that case then I would have said, inna rajil jahil jida.

By the way I said, "He is a very ignorant man" and not "YOU are a very ignorant man".

peace

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