Subclassifying The Three Parts Of Speech
In the last lesson, you learned about the three parts of speech: the اِسْم, the فِعْل, and the حَرْف. The aim of this lesson is to further divide these three parts of speech. This lesson is fairly relaxed, so unless otherwise stated, don't worry too much about needing to remember everything. We'll begin with the اِسْم.
اِسْم
Words can be said to belong to families, and what makes words part of the same family is that they are all derived from the same root, 'the ancestor' in our analogy. For example, help, helper, helping, helped, helpingly, helpfully - we would consider these to be from the same family. We can consider the word 'help' to be the original source from which all the other words in the family are derived.
Then there are some words that are the only member of their family. They don't derive from any other word nor does anything derive from them. For example, a tree. It is a very specific entity that represents a particular type of entity, which doesn't really allow it to birth a whole range of new words based on it. You might get some, but nothing to the level of our 'help' example above.
This rough English analogy is exactly how we can subdivide the اِسْم into three categories:
| جَامِد | Words which are not derived, nor does anything derive from them, e.g.
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| مَصْدَر | This is the source word from which others are derived. In English, they are called the Infinitive/Gerund. They represent actions and get a 'to (blank)/(blank)ing' translation, e.g.
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| مُشْتَق | Words that are derived from the مَصْدَر e.g.
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فِعْل
The فِعْل is quite straightforward in its breakdown. All three are important to learn but you will encounter them so frequently there is no need to memorize them right now.
| مَاضِي | Past tense verb: كَتَبَ (he wrote) |
| مُضَارِع | Present/Future tense verb: يَكْتُبُ (he is writing/he writes/he will write) |
| أَمْر | Command verb: اُكْتُبْ (write) |
حَرْف
The حَرْف breaks down into two types. You don't need to remember this.
| عَامِل | Governing agent |
| غَيْر عَامِل | Non-governing agent |
We will discuss what it means for a Harf to govern words in much more detail in the future. But to summarize, when a Harf is a governing agent, it influences the grammatical state of a word following it. A non-governing agent does not, and the word it is associated with would look the same whether or not the Harf was present.