# i3raab/i'rab الإﻋﺮﺍﺏ



## WadiH

Technically, this is a question about other languages, not Arabic, but only people familiar with Arabic would know what I'm talking about.  Do we know of any languages that use a concept similar to i'rab, or is it a phenomenon unique to Arabic?


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## Anatoli

Interesting question 
I can call myself a linguist, although, I am not an expert in Semitic languages.  The Arabic grammar is similar to Hebrew but more complex, as far as I know but if you talk about complexities of grammar in general, not about similarities, Slavic languages have very similar concepts:

I will use my native (Russian) for comparison:
1) genders, we have 3 genders - masculine, feminine, neuter + plural forms. Nouns, adjectives, numerals and pronouns have genders

All use different pronouns, endings, adjectives, case endings

2) Cases: we have 6. Although, we don't have a comncept of definiteness/definiteness, endings are often not as predictable as in Arabic (different types of declensions)
3) Conjugations: in present/future tense we have a complex system of personal endings, although we have less pronouns than in MSA, so less endings to remember. For the past tense, verbs differ on gender and number only (present tense don't have difference in genders)

3) Making plural forms have both predictable and very unpredictable endings, we have less internal changes than in Arabic.
4) The root letters can also change, which makes them hardly recognisable in words having the same roots. Not only vowels but some consonants may have predictable changes. Just to give a quick example: words may have stems with variations: laga- and lozh- are one and the same root.

I hope that's plenty, depending on what you wish to know.


Many other languages have various grammar complexity. I`rab is just another word for grammar, isn't it.

Amazing similarity is in the way the English verbs "to be" and "to have" are rendered in both Arabic and Russian. For example, you only express "to be" in the past and the future (same in Russian), the noun following the verb is not in nominative (same in Russian) and when you want to say "I have", you say "at me" (same in Russian).

I`rab in Arabic:
baytun jadiidun/al-baytu al-jadiidu
baytin jadiidin/al-bayti al-jadiidi
baytan jadiidan/al-bayta al-jadiida

Russian (just one type of declension) case endings:

Nominative  нов*ый* дом
Genitive нов*ого* дом*а*
Dative нов*ому* дом*у*
Accusative нов*ый* дом
Instrumental нов*ым* дом*ом*
Prepositional нов*ом* дом*е

*


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## WadiH

Thank you Anatoli, that was very informative.  I have a friend from Bosnia who, although is quite fluent in English and uses as complex a vocabulary as any native speaker, frequently drops the definite and indefinite articles (e.g. "Why don't we go to restaurant?").  I gathered that his language didn't really give much importance to definiteness, and I presume Bosnian belongs to the same broad family as Russian.

Back to my question, though, I realize I should have been more specific; what I meant by I'rab was what you linguists probably call "declensional endings" that are based on a word's grammatical position (subject, object, preceded by this or that type of word, etc.).  This is without a doubt the most difficult part of "classical" Arabic to master, and exceedingly few native speakers of Arabic can carry an entire conversation in fushaa without using incorrect endings or dropping some endings all together, even among the educated.


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## Anatoli

I edited my answer before seeing your 2nd post, maybe that's the answer to your question.

Russian case endings vs Arabic case endings:
1) Harder (in Russian) - there are more cases, a lot more declension types (depending on gender, endings and animate/inanimate) vs just triptote/diptote/invariable in Arabic. Endings are often unpredictable and is very hard for learners.
3) Easier (in Russian) - endings are *always written and always pronounced*. You always get exposure and when you just read  or listen a lot. You can learn these endings (you need to know the word stress, though).

Yes, Bosnian is also a Slavic language and its grammar is very similar. I can confirm they don't have cases. Bulgarian/Macedonian, unlike any other Slavic language don't have case endings but do have definite/indefinite concept.

There are a few languages, which have case endings, apart form Slavic, very noteably - Latin. German (not very advanced). Japanese has markers, which are very similar to case endings - easy to learn, they never change.


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## WadiH

Interesting. So in Russian you would have to change the ending of a word based on whether it is mansub or marfoo' just as in Arabic?

As you know these endings are entirely absent from spoken Arabic, whether inside the Peninsula or outside of it. I have a hypothesis that these diclensional endings (based on a word's position in the sentence or on whether it's a subject or object and the like) were never used in spoken Arabic, and were only invented for the purpose of poetry in the pre-Islamic era. This is because I cannot imagine an illiterate common person being able to sense the subtleties of I'rab and analyze the actual meaning of the sentence and change add a short vowel at the end of each word accordingly. However, if similar concepts exist in other spoken languages, then that would mean that it is indeed possible to do so, and the possibility would remain that there was a time when some Arabs did indeed use these endings in their speech in the same way that the formal rules of grammar prescribe.


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## Anatoli

> Interesting. So in Russian you would have to change the ending of a word based on whether it is mansub or marfoo' just as in Arabic?


Correct.

In Russian it is critical to add case endings, as the word order is very flexible and words endings show the relationships. They are natural for native speakers and (we don't have diglossia) are used heavily in the written and spoken language. The above endings I posted are mandatory, not optional in Russian.

Even Russian illiterates/semiliterates use them, although there are some cases where illiterates may use wrong case endings.

Coming from Russian background, Arabic case endings system do seem to make perfect sense (at least their presence), although there are nuances and usage differ (different words requre different case endings).

As for an illiterate Arabian person being to able to understand the subtleties of I`rab: how would it be possible to maintain and remember if the endings are not written and it's also quite possible to connect words without them? It also explains why dialects have often different internal vowels compared to MSA. What do you think?

German has a very interesting and IMHO unique case system where a combination of article/adjective/noun form shows what case it is (4 cases all up). There are strong and weak endings and absense thereof.

English: I give the book to my little brother.
German: Ich gebe *das* Buch mein*em* klein*en* Bruder.
Russian: Ya dayu knig*u* moy*emu* malen'kom*u* brat*u*.
Japanese: watashi-*wa* (I-wa) otooto-*ni* (little brother-ni) hon-*o* (book-o) yarimasu.

In Russian if I change "malen'kom*u* brat*u*" to "malen'k*ogo* [read: -ovo] brat*a*" - it changes the meaning to:

I give the book *of* my little brother. I can "break" the logic the same way in German and Japanese. The Arabic will require a different word order, so, IMHO, the case endings are not that important.


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## Anatoli

Case endings are admittedly too complex, that all Latin derivatives lost them. The same happened with Arabic dialects. I don't know what happened first - classical Arabic with endings or dialects without them


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## WadiH

Good stuff.

I ignorantly assumed that most languages would be like English, which has almost no analogue to Arabic case endings.  Thank you for indulging the musings of a non-specialist.  

I'll be back tomorrow.


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## Anatoli

I wonder if somebody could give examples (if there are any) where declension (I`rab) is critical for understanding Arabic and how spoken dialects deal with such situations.

I gave an example before where one case if substituted with another one changes the meaning.


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## WadiH

I'rab is only necessary for understanding the correct meaning in limited situations, such as deciding which is the subject and which is the object in a sentence beginning with a verb. However, in the spoken language this has come to be determined by word order, and so the need for I'rab is obviated.

For example, in classical Arabic, one could say

_Dharaba zaydun 3amran_ (Zayd hit 'Amr)

as opposed to:

_Dharaba zaydan 3amrun_ ('Amr hit Zayd)

Notice, the meaning changed without changing word order.

In spoken Arabic, you would have to either say:

_Zayd Dharab 3amr_ (Zayd hit 'Amr); OR
_3amr Dharab Zayd_ (Amr hit Zayd)

So, the meaning depends entirely on word order.

In most other instances in Classical Arabic, using incorrect endings will sound awkward to the trained ear but it will not really change the meaning.


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## Anatoli

Thanks, Wadi Hanifa, so the word order in spoken Arabic is SVO, not VSO? Will the classical word order sound stilted or confusing in dialects?


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## WadiH

I think SVO is the most commonly used - the default, if you will. But there are exceptional cases, in which the context determines the meaning (so I'rab is still not needed). Here's one example I can think of:

------------
- If you're making a declarative statement to someone, you would probably say something like

_"zayd dharab 3amr"_ (SVO).

But say you ask someone "did a7mad hit 3amr?", they would probably answer

"_La, elly dharab 3amr Zayd_" ("No, the one who hit 3amr was Zayd").

That's a case where you would use VOS.

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As for VSO, in general a statement like "dharab zayd 3amr" would sound strange. Off the top of my head I can't think of a case where you would use VSO in spoken Arabic except if you use prepositions, for example:

_ra7 a7mad lil maktab_ (Ahmad went to the office ... I don't know if this is VSO, but it certainly starts with VS)

But, like I said, in this case there's a preposition being used so I don't know if that counts.


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## Anatoli

Great, thanks for your explanation, Wadi Hanifa!


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## MarcB

Wadi, see this http://www-personal.umich.edu/~andyf/hist_arab.html  for some theories about your initial question.


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## WadiH

Thank you Marc.  I posted this thread after reading this very article actually.

What makes the theory that the i'rab was only used in poetry so attractive is because the fact that you are no longer bound by word order gives you enormous leeway to express the meaning you want while still keeping to the required rhythm and rhyme.  That makes it plausible that the system was invented for poetry.

However, that doesn't prove anything, and so the classical Arab theory of a pristine bedouin tongue similar to what's used by the Quran and the pre-Islamic poets that devolved into the modern dialects may still be true.


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## Josh_

The term used for the Arabic case system is desinential inflection, where desinential refers to the endings of words. .  Anyway, I remember reading that Latin is similar to Arabic in some respects regarding the case system (but I can't remember where I read that), and did a little research.  It is an inflected languages with the inflections occurring at the end of a word which indicate a word's grammatical function in a sentence.  I can't say I know Latin very well, but I will try to briefly explain some similarities.  To use an example from one of my Latin books:

Mulus silvam spectat.*
(The mule is watching the wood.)

Here the underlined endings indicate:
that mule is nominative (مرفوع ) and thus is the subject of the sentence.
that woods is accusative (منصوب ) and thus is the object of the sentence.  

So this corresponds to the Arabic:

يشاهد البغلُ الحرشَ
yushaahidu 'l-baghlu 'l-Hirsha.

We know mule is the subject because of the nominative (مرفوع ) 'u' and we know woods is the object because of the  accusative (منصوب ) 'a'.

Without switching the words the endings can be switched to reverse the meaning:

Mulum silva spectat.

Now, mule is in the accusative and woods is nominative and the meaning becomes:

The wood is watching the mule.

In Arabic (without reversing word order):

يشاهد البغلَ الحرشُ
yushaahidu 'l-baghla 'l-Hirshu.

But of course the normal word order is يشاهد الحرشُ البغلَ 


*The most common word order in Latin is SOV, but as endings determine grammatical function it is possible to rearrange the words in order to emphasize something.


Perhaps someone with more familiarity with Latin can shed more light on this.


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## Outsider

Curiously, the Romance languages also evolved towards SVO syntax, like colloquial Arabic. As did English (from Old English)!

As for the loss of the declensions, it was partly for phonetic reasons. The case suffixes of Latin often ended with consonants which became silent in late Antiquity. The rest of the suffix was often identical for all cases. So the various forms of a noun became indistiguishable in speech (click here to see example), and the popular language began to use syntax to indicate syntactical function, rather than morphology.


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## Abu Rashid

Wadi,


> I have a hypothesis that these diclensional endings (based on a word's position in the sentence or on whether it's a subject or object and the like) were never used in spoken Arabic, and were only invented for the purpose of poetry in the pre-Islamic era.



That is doubtful, especially when we consider the Hadith collections, which are all normal everyday speech of people, and they clearly used the full Arabic declension system in their everyday speech.


> I ignorantly assumed that most languages would be like English, which has almost no analogue to Arabic case endings


Actually if you look at English 500 or more years ago, you'll fnd such a system did exist, it has slowly been worn down though but remnants still remain.


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## WadiH

Abu Rashid said:


> That is doubtful, especially when we consider the Hadith collections, which are all normal everyday speech of people, and they clearly used the full Arabic declension system in their everyday speech.


How is that clear, Abu Rashid? It's not clear to me at all.


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## Anatoli

Although, I asked this question myself, I have come up with another example where I'rab or case endings would be important for understanding, please let me know if there are mistakes 

Take this sentence with no vowels written:
صورة المدينة الكبيرة

1) Suurat*u* 'l-madiinat*i* 'l-kabiirat*i*
The picture of the big city

2) Suurat*u* 'l-madiinat*i* 'l-kabiirat*u
*The big picture of the city/town

In a simplified way both phrases would sound as _"Suurat al-madiina 'l-kabiira"_. The last word is on a pause, anyway, so the ending wouldn't be pronounced anyway (am I right about pausal forms?).

What will be the word order in colloquial Arabic or what order would you use in both cases to avoid the ambiguity in MSA?


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## Abu Rashid

Wadi,

The hadith collections were originally just collected by individuals, who had heard the Prophet (saw) and his Sahabah (ra) making statements. They were then later compiled into books, exactly as they were heard, without adding or subtracting.

Also it is a well known fact the Arabs were masters of language, that's why the Qur'an was sent to them, because they gave language a very high position and they cherished its perfection. I've even read that most people used to speak with full tajweed as well.

Just because they don't care much about language today, and neglect it, doesn't mean it was always the case.

I think your theory is based more on what you see today, rather than what occured in the past.


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## WadiH

I see. But don't you agree that the hadiths can be read with 90% of the declensional endings ommitted? If you do, then you'll see why it's not clear from the hadiths that people used them in everyday speech. Also, don't forget that people tend to "classicize" the language when quoting people in writing. For example, quotes attributed to modern political figures are almost always transcribed in "proper" formal Arabic even though we know for certain that's not how these people spoke in everyday life.


Anatoli said:


> In a simplified way both phrases would sound as _"Suura 'l-madiina 'l-kabiira"_. The last word is on a pause, anyway, so the ending wouldn't be pronounced anyway (am I right about pausal forms?).
> 
> What will be the word order in colloquial Arabic or what order would you use in both cases to avoid the ambiguity in MSA?


That's another good example.  You're correct about not pronouncing the declension when it occurs at a pause.

In colloquial Arabic, the word order is the same ("9oort el madinah el kibeerah", in my own accent), and it would have to be understood from context whether "kibeerah" refers to "el madinah" or to the "9oorah".


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## Anatoli

Thanks. Your post reminded me that in iDaafa, the final -t (taa' marbuuTa) should be pronounced in any case (Suura*t* al-madiina(ti)...), which I corrected. Also, I used "S" for "9" ص, just to clarify.


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## WadiH

Yes the "ta marbouTa" is pronounced, but because modern Arabic speakers are completely averse to I'rab, they attempt to put a "sukoon" on it.  However, the "sukoon" becomes a "kasra"  following the rule of "man3 iltiqa2 al-sakinayn" (preventing the meeting of two sukoons).  So the pronunciation actually becomes: "9oortil madinal kibeerah".


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## Abu Rashid

Wadi,



> If you do, then you'll see why it's not clear from the hadiths that people used them in everyday speech. Also, don't forget that people tend to "classicize" the language when quoting people in writing. For example, quotes attributed to modern political figures



I don't think you can compare the two situations. Political figures today are grandeurised with the language true, but in the early Islamic era, this was just the way people spoke. As I'm sure you're aware, Imam Shafi's mother took him all the way from Ghazzah to Hijaz, so that he could spend the large part of his childhood just perfecting his Arabic language. The value the Arabs put on the language is just a world apart from today. Having a poor command of the Arabic language was considered sloppy and distasteful, not to mention "lower class" and unintelligent. Today it's commonplace.

It seems to me your only supporting evidence for such a theory would be that it's easier not to speak with 3iraab, therefore people probably didn't, and it was just an artificial addition which was done for the record books.

Some well known spoken languages use even larger sets of declensions in everyday regular speech than Arabic, it's just a part of their language. I think German is an example of this, it has 4 cases (compared to Arabic's 3) as well as having 3 genders.

Arabic it appears is in a process of slow decline into simplification, which is accompanied by other alarming factors such as high levels of illiteracy. Well over 50% of all Arabs are illiterate and this is a reflection of the lack of emphasis placed on language and the prominence of simplified unwritten dialects/variants of the language.


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## WadiH

Well it's not just a matter of being easier to speak without the declensions.  It's a matter of (a)there being no dialect of Arabic, no matter how conservative or geographically isolated, preserving even a small part of the declension system (except for tanween in Nejd, but it's always tanween kasr, so it's really not the same thing), and (b) it being possible to read almost any Arabic text without the declension marks and without changing the meaning except in very limited circumstances.  This makes it possible that the system was an added level of ornamentation. HOWEVER, please note that I never claimed that this _proved_ anything.

The evidence you present on the other hand is not convincing either. 

As I said, the hadiths do not tell us much about Arabic speech in that era, and can easily be read without the declensions.  In fact, I can probably read many if not most hadiths with a Nejdi or bedouin accent and not change a word.

The issue of taking one's child to the desert to learn "fasa7ah" also has little bearing on the question of declensions, as speech can be very eloquent and literate without them, and children raised in an isolated bedouin environment are always more eloquent in Arabic than their urban counterparts even today without the use of declensions.

Finally, your reading of the current situation of Arabic is, in my opinion, incorrect for several reasons.  First, you can't agrue that illiteracy is behind the loss of declensions as illiteracy was immeasurably higher in pre-Islamic Arabia than it is today. The society that is supposed to have spoken with declensions was primary an illiterate one.  Second, the rise in literacy is not promoting the traditional dialects but weakening them and making them increasingly influenced by the "formal" or "written variety".  This is indeed leading to "simplification" but not in the way you describe.  Rather, the complexities and variations in vocabulary and syntax, especially in the conservative dialects, are being pruned away, and a standardization of the spoken language across larger geographical regions is ocurring.  The written language is therefore far more influential on people's speech than it's ever been.


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## suma

Anatoli said:


> English: I give the book to my little brother.
> German: Ich gebe *das* Buch mein*em* klein*en* Bruder.
> Russian: Ya dayu knig*u* moy*emu* malen'kom*u* brat*u*.
> Japanese: watashi-*wa* (I-wa) otooto-*ni* (little brother-ni) hon-*o* (book-o) yarimasu.
> 
> In Russian if I change "malen'kom*u* brat*u*" to "malen'k*ogo* [read: -ovo] brat*a*" - it changes the meaning to:
> 
> I give the book *of* my little brother. I can "break" the logic the same way in German and Japanese. The Arabic will require a different word order, so, IMHO, the case endings are not that important.


 
Not sure about your conclusion on Arabic word order, consider the following:

أعطي الكتابَ أخاي الصغيرَ
أعطي كتابَ أخي الصغيرِ فلاناً 
The part in red completes the sentence (the 2nd object).


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## cherine

But the two sentences *are* complete.
(by the way, what's أخاي ? if it's singular; then akhii doesn't change, if it's dual it's either أخويّ or أخواي )
The difference is in the meaning:
أعطي الكتابَ أخي الصغيرَ = I give the book to my younger brother
أعطي كتابَ أخي الصغيرِ فلانًا= I give my young brother's book to someone.

The verb أعطى (to give) effects two objects ينصب مفعولين .


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## suma

Anatoli said:


> I wonder if somebody could give examples (if there are any) where declension (I`rab) is critical for understanding Arabic and how spoken dialects deal with such situations.
> 
> I gave an example before where one case if substituted with another one changes the meaning.


 
Here's a classic example of importance of i3raab taught in Muslim schools:

إنّما يخشى اللهَ من عباده العلماءُ.

In everyday speech without regard to i3raab and looking at the word order this would seem to mean "Verily God fears His servant scholars". But of course the correct meaning as indicated by i'raab "Verily the servant scholars fear God".


cherine said:


> But the two sentences *are* complete.
> (by the way, what's أخاي ? if it's singular; then akhii doesn't change, if it's dual it's either أخويّ or أخواي )
> The difference is in the meaning:
> أعطي الكتابَ أخي الصغيرَ = I give the book to my younger brother
> أعطي كتابَ أخي الصغيرِ فلانًا= I give my young brother's book to someone.
> 
> The verb أعطى (to give) effects two objects ينصب مفعولين .


 
Cherine,
isn't akh here in manSoob case and therefore requires the alif (as it's one of those rare words taking alif as marker of naSb)?

in the second sentence without fulaan then where is the 2nd object? I give my little brother's book.... (to who?)

Oops ! you're right that alif is used with other pronoun suffixes not the yaa. sorry.


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## cherine

suma said:


> Cherine,
> isn't akh here in manSoob case and therefore requires the alif (as it's one of those rare words taking alif as marker of naSb)?


You're right that the word "akh" (brother) is one of الأسماء الخمسة )أب، أخ، حم، فو، ذو) which take a Damma for "ar-raf3", a kasra for "aj-jarr" and an alif for "an-naSb".
The exception is when they are connected to ياء المتكلم like in this word.
So the i3raab of this word is : مفعول به منصوب بفتحة مقدرة، والياء مضاف إليه 


> in the second sentence without fulaan then where is the 2nd object? I give my little brother's book.... (to who?)


to fulaan فلانًا (someone). 
أعطي الكتابَ أخي الصغيرَ = I give the book to my younger brother
أعطي كتابَ أخي الصغيرِ فلانًا= I give my young brother's book to someone
In the first sentence, the first object is the book الكتابَ and the second object is my brother أخي
In the second sentence, the first object is the book الكتابَ, the second one is "fulaan" فلانًا.


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## suma

cherine said:


> to fulaan فلانًا (someone).
> أعطي الكتابَ أخي الصغيرَ = I give the book to my younger brother
> أعطي كتابَ أخي الصغيرِ فلانًا= I give my young brother's book to someone
> In the first sentence, the first object is the book الكتابَ and the second object is my brother أخي
> In the second sentence, the first object is the book الكتابَ, the second one is "fulaan" فلانًا.


 
Cherine go back and read my post and the original one. You misunderstood. I supplied the part in red, because without fulaan the sentence is missing the 2nd object and thus incomplete. Get it?


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## cherine

suma said:


> Cherine go back and read my post and the original one. You misunderstood. I supplied the part in red, because without fulaan the sentence is missing the 2nd object and thus incomplete. Get it?


Sorry Suma, sometimes I'm more stupid than usual.

Would you please help me get it by transliterating and parsing your sentence ?
Thank you


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## Whodunit

Anatoli said:


> German has a very interesting and IMHO unique case system where a combination of article/adjective/noun form shows what case it is (4 cases all up). There are strong and weak endings and absense thereof.



Thanks for the compliment on my native language. 

I can't imagine how hard it must be to grasp that "mit groß*em* Aufwand" is the same case as "mit dem groß*en* Vater," both (Aufwand/Vater) being maculine singular in the dative case (required by the preposition 'mit'). The former is indetermined, and the latter isn't.

Your example (geben) is a very good one. I'd like to add more languages:


> English: I give the book to my little brother.
> German: Ich gebe *das* Buch mein*em* klein*en* Bruder.
> Russian: Ya dayu knig*u* moy*emu* malen'kom*u* brat*u*.
> Japanese: watashi-*wa* (I-wa) otooto-*ni* (little brother-ni) hon-*o* (book-o) yarimasu.


Latin: (*Hoc*) libr*um* fratr*i* parv*o* me*o* do.
Ancient Greek: Τ*ὴν* βίβλ*ον* ἐμ*ῷ* νέ*ῷ* ἀδελφ*ῷ* δίδωμι. 
Czech: Dám knih*u* m*ému* mal*ému* bratr*u*.


> In Russian if I change "malen'kom*u* brat*u*" to "malen'k*ogo* [read: -ovo] brat*a*" - it changes the meaning to:
> 
> I give the book *of* my little brother. I can "break" the logic the same way in German and Japanese. The Arabic will require a different word order, so, IMHO, the case endings are not that important.



So, let's create a good overwiew (changing the sentences above to genitive constructions):


> English: I give the book *of* my little brother.German: Ich gebe das Buch mein*es* klein*en* Bruder*s*.
> Russian: Ya dayu knigu moy*ego* [moyevo] malen'k*ogo* [-ovo] brat*a*.
> Japanese: watashi-wa (I-wa) otooto-*no* (little brother-no) hon-o (book-o) yarimasu


Latin: (Hoc) librum fratr*is* parv*i* me*i* do.
Ancient Greek: Τὴν βίβλον ἐμ*οὺ* νέ*οὺ* ἀδελφ*οὺ* δίδωμι. 
Czech: Dám knih*u* m*ého* mal*ého* bratr*a*.


Wadi Hanifa said:


> For example, in classical Arabic, one could say
> 
> _Dharaba zaydun 3amran_ (Zayd hit 'Amr)
> 
> as opposed to:
> 
> _Dharaba zaydan 3amrun_ ('Amr hit Zayd)



This reminds me of this German sentence:

De*r* Hund aß de*n* Fisch. (The dog ate the fish)
De*n* Fisch aß de*r* Hund. (same meaning)

If one didn't know German well, one would eye the latter sentence kind of strangely, because it would look like "The fish ate the dog."

I can't translate your Arabic sentence, because names are normally not inflected in German, so the pun wouldn't work:

Zayd schlug Amr. (Zayd hit Amr)
Amr schlug Zayd. (Amr hit Zayd)


Wadi Hanifa said:


> For example, in classical Arabic, one could say
> 
> _Dharaba zaydun 3amran_ (Zayd hit 'Amr)
> 
> as opposed to:
> 
> _Dharaba zaydan 3amrun_ ('Amr hit Zayd)


 
This reminds me of this German sentence:

De*r* Hund aß de*n* Fisch. (The dog ate the fish)
De*n* Fisch aß de*r* Hund. (same meaning)

If one didn't know German well, one would eye the latter sentence kind of strangely, because it would look like "The fish ate the dog."

I can't translate your Arabic sentence, because names are normally not inflected in German, so the pun wouldn't work:

Zayd schlug Amr. (Zayd hit Amr)
Amr schlug Zayd. (Amr hit Zayd)


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## Anatoli

Whodunit said:


> This reminds me of this German sentence:
> 
> De*r* Hund aß de*n* Fisch. (The dog ate the fish)
> De*n* Fisch aß de*r* Hund. (same meaning)
> 
> If one didn't know German well, one would eye the latter sentence kind of strangely, because it would look like "The fish ate the dog."
> 
> I can't translate your Arabic sentence, because names are normally not inflected in German, so the pun wouldn't work:
> 
> Zayd schlug Amr. (Zayd hit Amr)
> Amr schlug Zayd. (Amr hit Zayd)


But in Russian you can, the identical sentences differ in word order but not in endings:

Zayd hit Amr: Заид ударил Амр*а* = Амр*а* ударил Заид.

Amr hit Zayd: Амр ударил Заид*a* = Заид*а* ударил Амр.

ударил [udaril]

In Russian there are some invariables like in Arabic but most words change their endings including names.


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## clevermizo

I just wanted to address two topics of discussion throughout this particular thread, 1) the existence of case in old spoken Arabic, and 2) the comparison to European case systems (which was the impetus for the whole thread).

The existence of a functional case system in spoken Arabic of earlier epochs is actually contentious. A good discussion of the entire subject is given in Jonathan Owen's _Linguistic History of Arabic_. 

The evidence that he presents suggests that early on in the Arabian peninsula there were probably dialects in which it was present and dialects in which it was not. By comparative linguistics, _reconstructing_ the case system from extant spoken forms is very difficult, and it is likely that all modern spoken forms originate from (an) ancient dialect(s) of Arabic that did not have a functional case system. Nonetheless, in Arabic theatre in which earlier epochs of history are romanticised, there is a belief that everyone spoke in perfect fuSHa which is patently false. The old grammarians of the Arabic language, like Siibawayh (سيبويه) noted constantly the "deviations" from the classical language or the "errors" made in people's speech. And that's more than 1000 years ago.

That said, case in fuSHa Arabic is an archaic feature which is also present in Akkadian. Most Semitic languages lost it, actually, except for some vestiges (notably, the adverbial of place in Biblical Hebrew marked by /-a/, as well as some name alternation in Biblical Hebrew with suffixed /-u/). 

The other thing is case in other languages: the labeling of Arabic syntactic alternants as "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" is traditional Western terminology, but difficult. For example, "nominative case" in European languages refers to agents or subjects of clauses of syntax. However, subjects/agents become manSuub in Arabic under certain conditions (notable after particles like إنّ). "Accusative" usually refers to the direct objects of verbs, and is usually not called for in predicates of existential/copula statements like "I was a doctor." However, the equivalent word for doctor in Arabic would be manSuub after kaana. Not only that, but adverbs are generated by casting words into naSb case. "Genitive case" is really only "genitive" when it comes to iDaafa. Because of these difficulties I tend to prefer the Arabic terminology.

Note the native terminology is also used with the verb system, which is incompatible with the comparison to European noun cases. What the function of i3raab in Arabic seems to be is the marking of syntactic positions (subordination, subject VS. predicate, coordination), which sometimes maps onto similar exploitation of noun cases in Europe, but does not necessarily occupy the same overall semantic space. 

So in some senses, it is similar and in some senses it is not. Direct objects are in fact marked by naSb, prepositions govern a certain change in the final vowel of their complements. I know it may be obvious to say this (we shouldn't compare, blah blah blah) - but I think it has merit because students who use the European nominal declension model as an analogy might just be setting themselves up to be misled some of the time. I know I had a hard time understanding why adverbs where in "accusative" case, until I just stopped using that word to describe it.


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## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> By comparative linguistics, _reconstructing_ the case system from extant spoken forms is very difficult, and it is likely that all modern spoken forms originate from (an) ancient dialect(s) of Arabic that did not have a functional case system.


 
One vestige of it in spoken Arabic is the "tanween", which is still present in the Arabic of central Arabia. It is, however, exclusively tanween kasr (e.g. _beitin_, for _beit_), and so is independent of whether the noun is "nominative", "accusative", etc.  Tanween fatH was also used in Andalusian Arabic, according to Encyclopedia of Islam.  Would this be evidence for or against the existence of the fusha system in older versions of spoken Arabic?

Also, if spoken Arabic never had a case system, where did the case system used by the classical poets and by the Quran come from?


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## clevermizo

Tanwiin is not necessarily a vestige of the case system: Tanwiin marks indefiniteness and when it occurs in modern spoken Arabic dialects it always has one form (-in or -an). This isn't enough to go on to reconstruct the same cases as Classical Arabic. If there was a dialect in which tanwiin had more than one form which was grammatically regulated, then we would be able to start talking about case reconstruction.

Secondly, I did not say that spoken Arabic never had a case system. I said that according to Jonathan Owens in _Linguistic History of Arabic_, there were probably ancient dialects which employed the case system and dialects that did not. The modern case-less dialects probably evolved from ancient dialects which were also caseless. We already know that the language of the Qur'an was different from other dialects, since marks like hamza had to be added to it later.

The reason to say that in ancient times there were probably non-case varieties of Arabic, is because it simply cannot be reconstructed across the gamut of modern data. Arabic is spoken in dialects from Uzbekistan to Nigeria. To believe that something like that was lost everywhere is hard to swallow. It is not a matter of education, as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Poor Slavic speaking people in Europe use their (much more complicated) case systems in everyday speech all the time. What sounds a little easier is that the Arabic that left the peninsula and went through the conquests already did not have case, and so the people who learned to speak it in new areas therefore did not use it. Lots of dialects preserve really ancient features, like in Yemen using "ma" to mean the question word "what." There's no reason to think that _somewhere_ case wouldn't be preserved if it indeed existed in the common ancestor.

Another reason to claim it is that even though a few Semitic languages have case systems, i.e. Akkadian and Classical Arabic - most languages in the Afro-Asiatic family do not have case systems. By reconstruction then, not-having-case is actually an older, more ancient situation than having-case.
A lot of this argument is based on the comparative linguistic method, which has been used to reconstruct systems like Proto-Indo-European. The basic tenet is that you should be able, by considering all the modern data, to reconstruct the common ancestor. Based on European languages, we can say that Proto-Indo-European had case since it is marked in many languages. In fact, by comparison of the endings used in Russian, Lithuanian, etc. we can reconstruct what the ancient common endings were.

 We can say, based on the fact that tanwiin is used in some disparate dialects to mark an indefinite noun, and is missing in others, posit that tanwiin was present in an ancient form of the spoken language to mark indefiniteness. However, there is no modern evidence to that can be used to reconstruct the presence of the -u/-a/-i vowel alternations.


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## Outsider

clevermizo said:


> The reason to say that in ancient times there were probably non-case varieties of Arabic, is because it simply cannot be reconstructed across the gamut of modern data. Arabic is spoken in dialects from Uzbekistan to Nigeria. To believe that something like that was lost everywhere is hard to swallow.


Well, Latin was once spoken from Lisbon to Bucharest, but eventully lost its cases, too. Granted, Romanian has slight traces of the case system...


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## Whodunit

clevermizo said:


> The other thing is case in other languages: the labeling of Arabic syntactic alternants as "nominative", "accusative" and "genitive" is traditional Western terminology, but difficult. For example, "nominative case" in European languages refers to agents or subjects of clauses of syntax. However, subjects/agents become manSuub in Arabic under certain conditions (notable after particles like إنّ). "Accusative" usually refers to the direct objects of verbs, and is usually not called for in predicates of existential/copula statements like "I was a doctor." However, the equivalent word for doctor in Arabic would be manSuub after kaana. Not only that, but adverbs are generated by casting words into naSb case. "Genitive case" is really only "genitive" when it comes to iDaafa. Because of these difficulties I tend to prefer the Arabic terminology.


 
Ehm, I'd like you to think about your arguments again. Are they really an evidence for Arabic not having had cases like we use them today in German, Russian, and Czech? They are not. Period.

The Latin _accusativus cum infinitivo_ (accusative with infinitive) is a special grammatical matter that is written in the accusative and translated as a nominative:

Enuntiationem tuam falsam esse cogito.
literally: I think your sentence be wrong.

= I think that your sentence is wrong.

enuntiatio = sentence (acc.: enuntiationem)
tua = your _f. _(acc.: tuam)
falsa = wrong _f._ (acc.: falsam)
esse = to be (infinitive)
cogitare = to think (1st sg. pres.: cogito)


There's also the ablativus absolutus (tempore dato = when time was given), which becomes a nominal subordinate clause in modern languages.

To express an obligatory sentence, you use the gerundive plus the dative in Latin: "Mihi deos colendus est" (= Me is to worship the Gods ==> I have to worship the Gods).


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## clevermizo

Outsider said:


> Well, Latin was once spoken from Lisbon to Bucharest, but eventully lost its cases, too. Granted, Romanian has slight traces of the case system...



This is true, however, we have attested cases in evolving spoken Vulgar Latin all over the what-would-become the Romance speaking world throughout history.

Old French had cases (I believe 2), and modern Romanian has a simple case system as you note.

There is at least, then, one modern Romance language that has remnants of a case system. There is no modern Arabic dialect with evidence of a case system. That is not to say it isn't possible that Arabic dialects lost case everywhere, but considering how many dialects there are, with a myriad of conservative and innovative features, we would predict a likelihood of it being preserved in some way, some where. To my knowledge, there is not a single Arabic dialect in which this is the situation.


Whodunit said:


> Ehm, I'd like you to think about your arguments again. Are they really an evidence for Arabic not having had cases like we use them today in German, Russian, and Czech? They are not. Period.



I defer to your knowledge of Latin. At the end of the day, I guess, the nomenclature "nominative" "accusative" and "genitive" in Arabic is just nomenclature, and one has to learn what governs what as far as cases are concerned.

A striking difference I think between European cases and Arabic cases is that in waqf case endings are almost completely nullified, the only exception being an > a. I do not believe that any European system allows full nullification of the case endings, but I may be wrong about this. What this means is that at least in some situations in Arabic, case marking is considered "unnecessary," and I don't think that case marking can ever be that much so in Latin or German or Russian.


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## WadiH

clevermizo said:


> Tanwiin is not necessarily a vestige of the case system: Tanwiin marks indefiniteness and when it occurs in modern spoken Arabic dialects it always has one form (-in or -an). This isn't enough to go on to reconstruct the same cases as Classical Arabic. If there was a dialect in which tanwiin had more than one form which was grammatically regulated, then we would be able to start talking about case reconstruction.


Agreed.


> Secondly, I did not say that spoken Arabic never had a case system. I said that according to Jonathan Owens in _Linguistic History of Arabic_, there were probably ancient dialects which employed the case system and dialects that did not. The modern case-less dialects probably evolved from ancient dialects which were also caseless. We already know that the language of the Qur'an was different from other dialects, since marks like hamza had to be added to it later.
> 
> The reason to say that in ancient times there were probably non-case varieties of Arabic, is because it simply cannot be reconstructed across the gamut of modern data. Arabic is spoken in dialects from Uzbekistan to Nigeria. To believe that something like that was lost everywhere is hard to swallow. It is not a matter of education, as has been mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Poor Slavic speaking people in Europe use their (much more complicated) case systems in everyday speech all the time. What sounds a little easier is that the Arabic that left the peninsula and went through the conquests already did not have case, and so the people who learned to speak it in new areas therefore did not use it. Lots of dialects preserve really ancient features, like in Yemen using "ma" to mean the question word "what." There's no reason to think that _somewhere_ case wouldn't be preserved if it indeed existed in the common ancestor.


Ok, so what happened to the dialects that used the case system? And do you think the works of the early Arab linguists and philologists are of any use in this regard?


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## Whodunit

clevermizo said:


> I defer to your knowledge of Latin. At the end of the day, I guess, the nomenclature "nominative" "accusative" and "genitive" in Arabic is just nomenclature, and one has to learn what governs what as far as cases are concerned.


 
To be honest, when I started studying Arabic, I tried to memorize the case markers as well:

ar-rajul*u* kabiir*un*.
2a3limu 2an al-baab*a* al-bayt*i* al-kabiir*i* maksuur*un*.

However, the only case that is really _written_ is the indetermined accusative masculine:

ra2aytu rajul*an* kabiir*an* (رأت رجلاً كبيلاً)



> A striking difference I think between European cases and Arabic cases is that in waqf case endings are almost completely nullified, the only exception being an > a. I do not believe that any European system allows full nullification of the case endings, but I may be wrong about this. What this means is that at least in some situations in Arabic, case marking is considered "unnecessary," and I don't think that case marking can ever be that much so in Latin or German or Russian.


 
I understand that. However, there are always languages and situations in case languages where you can forget about the cases. Sometimes cases get mixed up, even by native speakers (in German: dative/accusative), often they are not important (after prepositions, it's all the same, the meaning doesn't change), names are not inflected in all languages (in Slavic languages and Arabic, they are), and so on.

If you want to know more about cases in different languages and language families, you should open a new thread in the Other Languages Forum.


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## Anatoli

> However, there are always languages and situations in case languages where you can forget about the cases.


Not in Russian or many other Slavic languages. You can't forget them, the mistakes are forgiven to foreigners, of course.



> names are not inflected in all languages (in Slavic languages and Arabic, they are)


Yes, to an extent. Some names are invariables in Russian like in Arabic but the same names can be inflected in other Slavic languages.


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## Whodunit

Anatoli said:


> Not in Russian or many other Slavic languages. You can't forget them, the mistakes are forgiven to foreigners, of course.


 
I didn't mention "Russian" and "Slavic languages." 

However, what I wanted to say is that even native speakers use the wrong case (at least in German) wherever it will not sound ambiguous. They would not confuse the nominative and accusative case, because that would change the meaning, but using the dative instead of the accusative is understandable, especially after prepositions. This might not be the case in Russian, but I guess in other Slavic languages, natives confuse the cases to some extent as well.


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## Hegyi

Wadi Hanifa said:


> ...  That makes it plausible that the system was invented for poetry...



The case endings (the i'rab) are not an Arabic innovation, nor were thery invented by  poets.  Comparative linguistics teaches us so.   Case endings similar to those of Classical Arabic are found in related languages, viz. in Akkadian (Assyrian and Babylonian), and in Classical Ethiopian, or Geez.  They have also been reconstructed for Berber, the Cushitic languages, and Ancient Egyptian.  Semitist have also discovered traces of them in Biblical Hebrew.


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## WadiH

Yes, I realize it now.  You have to admit, though, they make the Arabic form of poetry much easier to work with>


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## Anatoli

Whodunit said:


> I didn't mention "Russian" and "Slavic languages."
> 
> However, what I wanted to say is that even native speakers use the wrong case (at least in German) wherever it will not sound ambiguous. They would not confuse the nominative and accusative case, because that would change the meaning, but using the dative instead of the accusative is understandable, especially after prepositions. This might not be the case in Russian, but I guess in other Slavic languages, natives confuse the cases to some extent as well.


I know you didn't, I thought I'll mention anyway.

I heard people having this case confusion with Germans. In Russian some people confuse cases in pretty rare situations and combinations, it actually doesn't make cases less important IMHO, it emphasises the importance, here's an example, which somewhat annoyed me personally:

The older, slightly illiterate person says to her granddaughter, she wants to say "Give the book to mum" but it sounds like "Give mum's book". You can tell by the context, of course but it sounds weird, besides, it could really mean what it sounds like in  another context. 

"Day kn*i*g_u_ mam_y_" - instead of "Day knigu mam_e_".
(Дай книгу мамы - Дай книгу маме.)

I know this person, she mixes genitive and dative of feminine singular only. It doesn't happen with personal pronouns or other nouns.

I would give more examples but it would belong in the Slavic forum.  Case mix-up between Slavic languages is more common (e.g., Russian/Ukrainian) because languages may have slightly different rules for using cases.


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## Aydintashar

The Role of Morphemes
By: Aydin Yashar
 ​The phenomenon of إعراب is not specific to Arabic. It is a morphological tool, which serves to signal certain grammatical functions. In most languages nouns and corresponding adjectives are inflected according to their position in the sentence, and depending upon case, i.e. whether they are subjects, objects (which has a multitude of types), genitives, etc. This is very common in German, romance languages such as French, and agglutinative languages like Turkish (we shall see what "agglutinative" means). 
 
These morphological particles are not always "endings", as some people often confuse, they can appear more often than not as prefix, infix and suffix. In any case, they are classified as grammatical morphemes. Morphemes are the minimal functional units of language i.e., they carry some meaning or function, and are not further devisible. 
 
It is clear that morphemes should have two types: lexical and grammatical. Lexical morphemes transmit lexical meaning, while grammatical morphemes carry out some grammatical function. For example, the English word "opened" consists of "open" (a lexical morpheme), and "ed" (a grammatical morpheme signalling the past tense).
In certain cases, even the absence of a morpheme signals a grammatical function, and therefore can be identified as a morpheme (called zero morpheme). For example, in the phrase هذا کتابٌ the idea of a general present tense is inherent, just due to a missing morpheme. In some languages, such as English, you have to expressly indicate the present tense by some word.
 
In order that the word undergo some change, for example, in order to switch from the present tense to past tense, some morphemes have to change. This is evident for example, in the Arabic verb يکتبُ (he writes) which is derived from the root کتب through employment of a number of morphemic transformations as follows:
 
1 – ي is added as prefix.
2 – ک which had a fatha, is converted to a ساکن
3 – ت which had a fatha, has received a ضمّة
4 – ب which had a fatha, has received a ضمّة too.
 
These four transformations have led to the word يکتب which indicates the same root meaning, plus the idea of the present tense and the third person singlular, masculine. Now, a good question worth asking is, which of the 4 transformations described above is responsible for signalling the present tense, and which is responsible for signalling the third person. Which transformation caused the idea of "singular" and which is responsible for inducing the idea of "masculine".
 
The reply is that, it is impossible to assign any of these grammatical concepts to a single morpheme, and it can be safely claimed that all the 4 transformations above are responsible for the realisation of the various grammatical concepts on a collective basis.
 
This situation is in sharp contrast to the grammatical structure in Turkic languages, where each minimal grammatical concept can be distinctly assigned to a distinct morpheme. As an example, the Turkish word "*getmi**şdir*" (he has gone) can be dismantled as: "get-miş-dir", with each part corresponding to a pure grammatical function as follows:
 
*get*: stem word, which means "to go"
*mi**ş*: particle which signifies present perfect tense
*dir*: particle which signifies the third person singular.
 
You cannot analyse the morphological transformations in Arabic on such a "one-to-one" basis, except in minor cases. In a multitude of cases, *a number of morphemes are working together to signal a number of grammatical functions on a collective basis*. For example, مرفوع indicates both subject and predicate. منصوب also indicates both subject and predicate in certain cases. Therefore, you cannot assert that مرفوع is a pure morphological tool, nor is منصوب.  For this reason, Turkic languages are classified as "agglutinative" in the sense that various mono-functional morphemes can be cascaded in the same word to express the desired meaning and to enlarge its grammatical role and lexical content.
 
So far, we have illustrated two extreme cases, the case of Arabic, corresponding to completely interacting morphemes, and the case of Turkic corresponding to completely distinct morphemes, each with a clearly defined, minimal function. The path from Arabic to Turkic is, therefore, the path of purification of morphemes. There are, therefore, other languages, which take intermediary positions on this path. They employ both pure and interacting morphemes in various degrees to express various grammatical situations.
 
As we will see later in this analysis, the collective, interacting  morpheme structure has endowed Arabic with unique capabilities, making it the world's most capable language in terms of its capacity to express complex ideas, but simultaneously deprived it from certain privileges of the agglutinative structure.


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## WadiH

Aydintashar said:


> As we will see later in this analysis, the collective, interacting morpheme structure has endowed Arabic with unique capabilities, making it the world's most capable language in terms of its capacity to express complex ideas, but simultaneously deprived it from certain privileges of the agglutinative structure.


 
Where is the rest of the analysis, Aydintashar?


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