Arabic

Third Person Imperatives in the Qur’an

It’s always been kind of strange to me how a language can accommodate imperatives for other than the second person.

English, of course, cannot do this. You can only command someone who is right there in front of you. “Listen, you! Stay here! Don’t touch this! Have a good day!” The addressee is always “you”, even if that pronoun doesn’t appear explicitly.

Arabic, on the other hand, is one of the languages that does have this feature. You can issue an order to anyone, anywhere, at any time. Not present? No problem. Just use the third person imperative.

Read More→

The Qur’an’s Most Flexible Verbs

One cool thing about the Arabic language is that you can take a base “root word” and extract derivative words with related meanings by plugging the letters of the root word into different templates, or “forms”.

I’m not going to get into the details about how this process works here; we can leave that to the linguists. Instead, I’m interested in exploring a specific question: in the Qur’ān, which root verb appears in the most derivative verb forms? In other words: of all the root verbs that appear in the Qur’ān, which one comes in the biggest variety of flavours?

Read More→