Ahlan wa sahlan! Right now, we're going to talk about
quadrilateral verbs, or as they're called in Arabic الفعل الرّباعي.
You've heard a lot from me,
potentially, about how
most جذور in Arabic, most
word roots have three letters, and those three letters have a core meaning.
Like 'kaaf, taa, baa,'
which has a core meaning of 'to write,' or
'daal, raa, siin,'
which sort of means 'studying' in its most
intrinsic form, and we keep talking about three. Three. There are usually three, almost always three.
However, there are also some verbs in Arabic that have
four letter جذور.
They're a very very small proportion of the verbs and words that we
tend to work with. But they're fun, and they are, happily, very very regular, and they give us a particularly interesting
collection of words. One example, with which you're probably familiar,
is the verb
ترجمَ.
If
you hadn't thought hard about it,
it might have been reasonable to assume that we have this 'taa' at the beginning, and we know that form V has a 'taa'
at the beginning,
but actually ترجم is a letter,
excuse me, a word, with a four-letter
جذر
'taa, raa, jiim, miim.'
And we conjugate it
slightly differently from the Form V pattern. Form V in the present tense would be يَتَفَعَّل
and we would have that 'shadda,' telling us,
reinforcing the fact that it was Form V, but in the present tense, we would say
يُتَرجِم
And the مصدر is الترجمة.
And
we can use this verb, 'translate,' ,ترجم يترجم الترجمة
as kind of a template for some other
four-letter roots. There are a couple of
situations where we might expect to find four-letter roots. One is that we get a lot of loan words
that turn into four-letter roots.
The verb فلسفَ
if you said it out loud several times, and thought about it, you might recognize or realize or
infer that it meant
'to philosophize,' 'to be a philosopher,'
فلسفَ, so we can sort of hear where the consonants are coming from. So if we are going to philosophize
in the present tense, we would say
يُفلسِف, following the same exact vowel pattern, and the مصدر would be
الفلسفة.
Which also just means 'philosophy' in Arabic, that would be the normal word. Another situation or another
flavor of
four-letter-root words in Arabic, is we get a lot of words that have a certain onomatopoeia. That sound
like what they are trying to talk about. So there is a verb, we have a couple, but one verb meaning 'to whisper,' is
وسوسَ.
وسوسَ, and of course, in the present tense, following the Pattern would be
يُوَسوِس
which sounds very much like whispering, all by itself. Or, as the مصدر,
الوسوسة.
A fun verb.
Another thing that we can expect that sort of goes hand-in-hand with the loan-words aspect, is that we get a lot of
neologisms
in the form, excuse me, the
quadrilateral فعل رباعي category. If you have done some reading on political science,
you might have heard of a
word,
'Balkanize, Balkanization,'
that probably wasn't used much before the breakup of Yugoslavia, that means now in
Poli-Sci parlance, for a state to
break up into smaller states.
So
Arabic has adopted the term, which fits handily into the فعل رباعي pattern,
بلقن
يُبَلقِن
and the مصدر
البلقنة.
Just a couple of examples of how this pattern works. And since
The فعل رباعي is known for accommodating neologisms,
why don't you try it for yourself? Pick a favorite very evocative, maybe onomatopoeic kind of word in
English, and see if you can narrow it down to
four consonants, and fit it into this pattern, and then give it a try one day in class, and see if your instructor
understands, or can infer from the context what you mean. It'll be fun!
