Wednesday, 13 February 2013

Understanding sentences

Today I learned about constructing, or rather understanding, sentences. This lesson is about identifying the components of the subject or predicate of a sentence. For example, a subject can be a noun, noun phrase, pronoun, etc. The colors are subject and predicate:
  1. الْوَلَدُ مِصْرِي The boy is Egyptian. (noun, adjective)
  2. إِسْمُ الْبِنْتِ آمِنَةٌ The girl's name is Aminah. (noun phrase [genetive construction], noun)
  3. هُيَ صَغِيْرٌ He is small. (pronoun, adjective)
  4. خَرَجَ خَالِدٌ مُبَكِّرًا Khalid went out early. (proper noun, verb-adverb pair)
  5. خَالِدٌ خَرَجَ مُبَكِّرًا Khalid went out early. (proper noun, verb-adverb pair)
Notice in 2 that the word order for Arabic genetive construction is not the girl's name as in English but name the girl. Also notice in 5 and 6 that the word order for verb-adverb pair is verb-adverb which is the same as in English.