Arabic: Articles

From UniLang Wiki

In English we know the articles "the" and "a", the former is the definite article, the latter is the indefinite article.

1 The Definite Article
- 1.1 Assimilation
2 The indefinite: Nunation
3 The cases

[edit]

The Definite Article

A definite article is in Arabic expressed in a similar way, using the word (al) ال

This article is prepended to the noun it belongs, so there is no space in between. this also happens with many small words, in translitteration we will write a small hypen (-) between the words.

Example:

The book (al-kitābu): الكتاب

This article AL applies to both masculine and femine, in any combination with singular, dual or plural.

Note that the last U of the word marks nominative case, which we will discuss later.

[edit]

Assimilation

The AL article does however have an interesting feature: the L is not pronounced as L, although it is always written as such. If the first letter of the word it is attached to is any of the following, then its pronunciation will be that of that letter:

t - ت
th - ث
d - د
dh - ذ
r - ر
z - ز
s - س
sh - ش
S - ص
D - ض
T - ط
Z - ظ
n - ن

Example:

The sun - (ash-shamsu) الشمس

[edit]

The indefinite: Nunation

In order to express the indefiteness of a noun (or adjective, but more about that later) there is not really an article involved, but there is what is called nunation: the word will get a final N sound, which is unwritten except in fully vocalized writing, where the vowel sign will be doubled to indicate nunation. And an exception is also made to accusative case, which will be discussed later.

Example:

A book - (kitābun) كتاب

Note the final n in pronunciation, but there is NEVER a final ن in writing to express nunation! Also note that nunation expressive indefinitness and can therefore never occur in combination with the article AL. which expresses defiteness.

[edit]

The cases

Arabic has three cases, nominative, genitive and accusative. The U which you have seen in the above examples is characteristic of the nominative case, in genitive case there is an I and in accusative case there is an A:

Below an example with both a masculine noun: "book" (kitāb) كتاب and a feminine noun: "queen" (malika) ملكة