Qur’anic Verb Breakdown

When studying Qur’anic Arabic, a lot of time is spent learning the different forms and cases that verbs can take, and how to conjugate the verbs across all 14 possible Arabic pronouns. A lot of effort can go into memorizing all of these various combinations, although in reality, just a handful of situations make up the vast majority of verb occurrences that actually appear in the Qur’an.

This raises the question: Which verb cases, forms, and conjugations are the most frequently occurring in the Qur’an, and by how much?

Fortunately, we have resources like the Qur’an Corpus available to us, which has taken care of the hard work of performing word-by-word morphological analysis for us. All that’s left to do is scan the data and collect the statistics we want. Which I did!

This first graph shows how common each of the possible verb actors are. There are 14 possibilities for the actor of the verb, each associated with one of the Arabic pronouns.¹ Note that since the dual second person pronouns for the two genders (You 2M and You 2F) are generally indistinguishable from each other, I combined both of them into one category (You 2). Even combined, this category still isn’t very big.

Even though there are 14 possible pronouns, only 7 of them have any visible presence in this graph. The pronouns “he” and “they” (3+M) account for more than half of all verb occurrences in the entire Qu’ran.

Note that each bar in the graph is also divided up by the different tenses and cases that the verb might take on. I don’t want to get into the details here, but it seems unsurprising to me that the past tense and the present tense, nominative case are the most common. It is interesting to see how rare the present tense, accusative case is, though.

The same colour scheme appears in the next graph, which shows the frequency of each of the different verb forms in the Qur’an. A verb form is the template or pattern applied to the original root letters of the verb before it is conjugated to correspond to any specific tense, case, or actor, and usually it provides some variation of meaning to the original root word. There are different ways to indicate the different verb forms, including a popular scheme based on Roman numerals, but I opted to use the gerund templates for the labels here, since I think they are easier to recognize.

The overwhelming majority of verbs here belong to the ثلاثي مجرد form, or the basic three-letter root with no additional changes. The next two or three forms are enough to cover nearly every verb occurrence in the entire Qur’an! I wish I knew this before I started learning about verb forms. It would seem to be most important to develop a very strong competency in using and understanding those most frequent verb forms.

Finally, one last graph for now, showing how common verbs are that contain “sick” letters. The sick letters are (ا, و, ي) and it’s necessary to recognize when a verb has sick letter as one of its three root letters because verb morphology can get a great deal more complicated when one of these fellows are involved. I won’t get into any of the details here about how to work with them — I’m only concerned about how frequently they occur. Turns out, they are quite common…

The graphs shows that just over 50% of the verbs in the Qur’an are fully healthy and have no sick letters. But all the rest have at least one sick letter, and it’s most often either the second root letter (yikes, those can be tricky) or the third root letter (double yikes, those can be even more tricky).

There’s a lot more that can be investigated and reported regarding verbs in the Qur’an, but I will leave it at this for now. I think the main takeaway from these graphs is that, without a doubt, the different scenarios we study in Arabic morphology are not equally distributed. Verbs appear in some situations far more often than in others. Looking at these distributions presented visually makes it clearer just how often each kind of situation comes up.

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1. There is one pronoun for each combination of (masculine, feminine) x (1, 2, or 3+ individuals) x (second person, third person), giving 12 pronouns, plus two more for “I” and “We” in the first person, bringing the total up to 14. ↩︎