Earth, sky, day, a people, nafs and people

This lesson teaches six nouns: the earth, the sky, the day, a people, nafs, and people. One of them, nafs, carries the religion: the course gives no meaning of its own for it, and you read it in the verses, with the edition's meaning beside them. With these nouns the lesson teaches two things the corpus marks on a noun: whether it is masculine or feminine, and whether it is plural.

The new words

Feminine without a sign

Many feminine nouns end in -ah, the tā’ marbūṭah. Some do not, and are feminine all the same.

Al-arḍa is al- and arḍ, "earth". The corpus marks arḍ feminine, and its ending here accusative. Samāʾ, "sky", is feminine in the same way, with no sign of it.

Two ways to make a plural

One kind of plural adds an ending. The feminine plural adds -āt:

As-samāwāti is al- and samāwāt, the plural of samāʾ. The w before -āt is the last letter of the root s-m-w, which the singular writes as a hamzah. The corpus marks it feminine plural.

The other kind changes the vowels inside the word, and is called a broken plural:

An-nufūsu is al- and nufūs, a plural of nafs: the letters n, f and s stay, and the vowels around them change. The corpus marks nufūs feminine plural too, as it marks samāwāt: its tag names the number, not the way the plural is made.

A people, and people

Qawm is "a people", a group or a nation. Nās is "people", and the corpus marks it masculine plural.

In this verse, an-nāsu has the nominative ending u. Of its five words you now know three whole: yawma, "day"; yakūnu, the present of kāna from lesson 6; and an-nāsu. The fourth begins with ka-, which the next lesson teaches.

In a sentence

This sentence was written for practice. Al-arḍu kabīratun: "large" takes the feminine ending -ah, because arḍ is feminine.

Reading

واژه‌هایی که پس از این درس به‌طور کامل می‌شناسید نشانه‌گذاری شده‌اند.

Recall

• Is arḍ masculine or feminine?
• What does the feminine plural add to a noun?
• What is a broken plural?

Answers: feminine; -āt; a plural made by changing the vowels inside the word, as nufūs from nafs.

Next

The next lesson teaches how to call someone, how to say "like", the -nna that makes a verb certain, and the pronoun for women.