A house, the house, his house: making a noun definite

Arabic has no word for "a". Most nouns that are not definite show it by their ending. This lesson teaches that ending, tanwīn, and the three things that make a noun definite, with eight common nouns.

The new words

The ending of "a"

Tanwīn is an -n said after the last vowel of such a noun: as a rule -un in the nominative, -an in the accusative, -in in the genitive. The Qur’ān's text writes it as a doubled mark on the last letter, not as a letter. The corpus marks such a noun as indefinite. Some names take tanwīn too, and a name is definite of itself: this lesson is about common nouns.

Mālan: accusative, with an alif written after it, as -an most often has.

Wujūhun: nominative. It is a broken plural of wajh, and the corpus marks it masculine plural and indefinite.

Qaryatin: genitive. It is a feminine noun in -ah.

Māʾan: accusative. A noun ending in a hamzah after a long ā, as this one does, writes no alif after it.

Three ways to make it definite

The first way is al-. A noun with al- drops the tanwīn.

Al-māʾa: the same word as māʾan, with al-, and a short a at the end.

The second way is a pronoun. A noun with a joined pronoun is definite, and has neither al- nor tanwīn.

Māluhu is mālu and hu, "his". The corpus does not mark it indefinite.

Bi-yamīnihi is bi, then yamīni, then hi: the corpus marks yamīn genitive.

The third way is an iḍāfah. The first noun of an iḍāfah drops al- and tanwīn, as lesson 8 taught. It is definite when the second noun is. When the second is not, neither is the first, as in kullu shayʾin from that lesson, and the first still has no tanwīn.

Wajhi, in the genitive. It has no al- and no tanwīn. The noun after it has a joined pronoun, so it is definite, and wajhi is too.

With and without

Before a letter like n, the l of al- is written and the letter after it carries the shaddah: an-nahāra. How the two meet is taught in the library's Tajwīd title.

An-nahāra is al- and nahār, "daytime", in the accusative.

Al-bayti is al- and bayt, "house", in the genitive.

Baytan: the same noun with no al-, accusative. It is not definite.

In a sentence

This sentence was written for practice. Baytu l-waladi: baytu has no al- and no tanwīn, and al-waladi makes it definite: "the boy's house".

Māʾun has tanwīn: it is not definite. A place first, and then a thing that is not definite: this is how Arabic often says "there is".

Reading

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Recall

• What are the three endings of tanwīn?
• What three things make a noun definite?
• Why has wajhi in the example no tanwīn?

Answers: -un, -an and -in; al-, a joined pronoun, and being the first noun of an iḍāfah whose second noun is definite; it is the first noun of an iḍāfah.

Next

The next lesson teaches eight verbs of form IV, and what the first vowel of their present says.