Disclaimer:
- These notes were taken for my personal use and are in need of editing and reorganization. They may contain inaccuracies, missing or incomplete portions. My purpose was simply to help me retain the material through writing down what was told in class and providing me with quick facilities for searching back through the documents
- Please do not redistribute these notes

Bismillahir-rahmanir-raheem

3/22/2008 - Shariah Institute Arabic Intensive Course

First thing to understand -- why learning the language?

* Our consideration: primary reason to understand words of Creator and access words of our heritage of scholars. Will focus on aspects of language required to read vowelless text & understand -- hadith, tafsir, jumuah khutbah, etc.

Imam Shafi'i (r): book ar-Risaalah. Wrote: learning Arabic language is fard. Umar (ra): learn language of arabic and teach it to your children, because it's part of your religion. (advice to those sent to other parts of the world).

Begin studying: vowels & consonants

* 28 letters - consonants

some can be both consonants and vowels (like 'y' in English - 'ya' -- 'fiy' vs. 'yusuf')

* Can group 28 letters into triples -- (lots of possibilities) -- every group of three ordered letters has associated meaning -- seen, jeem, daal : has meaning of prostration in any word with those three letters

* Now, need vowels to be able to pronounce syllables. With three letters - 27 possible voweling combinations that could occur. Depending on the vowels put, you get more meaning... e.g. tense, voice: active/passive, etc. in addition to the meaning from the letters.

Vowel in Arabic is called "harakah" -- symbols/accents put on top/under consonants. Only 3 in Arabic: fathah, kasrah, dammah. Absence of vowel is called "sukoon" -- can't initial syllable with it. e.g "cat" (E). In E if have word of two syllables and first ends in same consonant as second starts -- write consonant doubled: "funny", "pretty"; in Arabic use "shaddah" to indicate  doubling, don't write the letter twice -- considered combination of sukoon and a vowel. 

Two subjects introduced in the first two weeks: sarf & nahw. Here's an example to work towards understanding sarf:

*Ex. - 'is-tan-sa-roo'   اِسْتَنْصَرُوْا  -- just to give notion of comprehensiveness of language

*looks like 1 words but is a compound structure with 7 inflections of meaning. 

Precise meaning: "they sought help"

Meaning 1: "help" - noon saad raa - نصر

  (let's see, if you change to طعم -- changes to "they sought food")

Meaning 2: notion of seeking -- ست (seen taa -- non-base letters) at the beginning

   (side note: alif can't have vowel; if you see alif with vowel is 'hamzah')

   (bu'sun -- misery بؤس )

   The hamzah is not giving the meaning - this is "enabling hamzah" enables you to pronounce word beginning with a sukoon (because not natural -- muta'adh-dir -- difficult). 

Meaning 3: past tense - absence of prefix letters for imperfect and the vowel on the saad

Meaning 4: active voice - arrangement of vowels

Meaning 5,6,7: gender, person, plurality of "they" comes from the "waw" at the end.

  Note: alif at end for script purposes -- in text with no vowels, need to figure out vowelling; many times can figure this out from context, but in some context, letters added to script as clues to rule out certain meanings. e.g. if you take away the alif: istansaroo or istanra wa (i.e. interpret waw as conjunction word vs. pronoun) -- no way to know if no vowels, so alif added for that purpose.

Science of "Sarf" would teach you all these meanings -- first book written in this science attributed to Imam Abu Hanifah -- first century A.H. This course will exhaust all of Sarf in the traditional method. 

*****

Ibn Khaldun: compares languages & says what makes Arabic superior -- its comprehensive nature. Need half number of words to express same meaning as in other languages. Not just the words that convey meaning but also non-word components (single letters, vowels, grammatical positioning, etc.) 

Prophet (sallallaahu alayhi wa sallam): I was given words of great comprehensive meaning and speech made concise for me. (jawaami'ul kalim)

For Arabic, vocabulary not as important for comprehension as grammar & morphology.

*Sarf: (patterns and endings)

- patterns of vowelization/non-base letters for conveying tense and voice

- designated endings (suffixes) which come at end of verb for gender, plurality, person

Conjugating: combining verb with its subject

In Arabic - 14 possible conjugations: (male/female) x (singular/dual/plural) x (first/second/third person) (really 18 possible but some overlap in the first person so reduce by 4)

Tables helpful for seeing all these listed out; also be able to see the variations. Because it seems like the verb is changing but really only the pronoun is changing.

Table layouts -- huwa huma hum; hiya huma hunna; anta ....; ana nahnu

Notion of model base-letters (like variables x, y, z in Algebra formulas)

(ghayr dhawil-uqool)

=======================

3/23/08 - The Science of Arabic Grammar

Need to learn how to arrange words to make meaning that will benefit listener

Terminology: (can build a tree out of this classification)

- most basic sound out of mouth: lafz ("utterance")

 +-- meaningless: muhmal ("useless")
 +-- meaningful: mawduu' (coinage -- given a meaning)

     + single (word): mufrad or kalimah: (2)

           + ism: (includes noun, pronoun, adjective, adverbs) - part of speech in arabic which has a meaning in itself and free from any association with time

           + fi'l: (verb) - part of speech in arabic which has a meaning in itself and is linked to time

           + harf: (prepositions, conjunctions, articles) small word - part of speech that has no meaning in itself

     + compound (of words): murakkab

           + phrase (non-beneficial): ghayr mufeed

           + sentence (beneficial): mufeed/jumlah (1)

(1) subject+predicate relationship-- link two or more words in a way upon which silence is appropriate

(2) English parts of speech: noun, pronoun, adjective (modifies a noun), adverb (modifies other than a noun - came quickly, very tall, came very quickly -- i.e. verb, adjective, adverb), verb, preposition (on ,with, by), conjunction (or, and, but), article (the, a)

                ('modifies' means it narrows it down to subset)

(3) how to make definitions (part of logic) -- start at highest categorization (type) and then make more specific to narrow it down

(4) Words, phrases, sentences -- the subject matter of grammar

Classification of ism:

(many ways of classifying words: along lines of gender, plurality, derived vs. 'frozen' (no derivation))

First way of classifying Ism: (based on being derived or not):

  - coined جامد (introduced in the very beginning): called 'frozen', not derived from something else, just refers to a particular object, e.g. رجل "rajul" man - not derived from anything nor is anything derived from it

  - masdar مصدر (launching pad): e.g. al-kitaabah الكتابة (to write) - ism from which other words are derived (but it is not derived from others)

How to decide which word is the source of all other derivations? The one with simplest meaning -- the infinitive, no tense, no additional connotation.

*****

Harf: primarily of two categories

- عامل ('aamil) - 'governing agent'

- غير عامل (ghayr 'aamil) 'non-governing agent'

Human beings experience emotional states. Emotions are reflected on our faces. Arabic words behave in similar manner -- they experience grammatical states, reflected on the last letter.

Examples:

In English - he/him/his - variations based on being subject/object of verb, or possessive

In Arabic this change of word based on grammatical usage happens in (almost?) all words.

The harf that cause these changes on the last letter of other words are 'governing'. Other harf don't cause such a change, and are thus 'non-governing'.

This is the spirit of Nahw -- grammatical states.

If you have a verb and two nouns.

Zayd, Amr, hit. Every language has method of determining sentence structure -- who did hitting, upon who was hitting done. Some languages do by sequence/order of words (like English) -- this limits the flexibility in arrangement. Some languages introduce additional particles (like Urdu with 'ne' and 'ko'): Zayd ne Amr ko mara -- this requires more words. Arabic allows all six arrangements of these three words and all are valid, with no extra particles. It all goes by the ending to distinguish the subject and object.

What is Nahw?

The science of Arabic grammar that talks about (1) the grammatical states of the three parts of speech and (b) how to arrange words to make meaningful sentences. (this is the 'on the spot' meaning).

======

Back to Sarf...

Recall 14 conjugations discussion, and how the pronouns attach onto the verbs to make it look as if it's just one word. These suffixes indicate person, number, and gender.

Now, past tense verbs:

The selected pattern for the past-tense, active voice of three letter verbs is: fa 'a la. فعل.

From 6th seeghah down, the laam has sukoon.
In third person, fem dual, the fathah on taa is just to help pronunciation with the following alif. The ta indicates femininity and alif is for dual. In general, though, the suffix consonants and vowels together indicate all three parts of the conjugation (you can't separate out).
In text without vowels, need to use context to figure out which conjugation is applicable.

For passive, change first vowel to dhammah and second to kasrah instead of fathah/fathah. So "fu-'i-la" فُعِلَ with same endings. In active the ending letters indicate the subject; in passive, the endings indicate the object.

Surah Jinn: wa anna la nadri a sharrun ureeda biman fil'ardi am araada bihim rabbuhum rashada. (evil occurrence not attributed to Allah; because bad etiquette). When to use active vs. passive is part of study of balaaghah. 

Four tenses of verb: past, imperfect (present&future), command, and prohibition.

===========================================

3/26/08 - Wednesday session

for reciting tables