Linguistics

Exceptional Situations

Sometimes, you think you really have reached an understanding of how things work. You get it. The rules have started to make sense.

And then you realize that no, actually, things don’t work the way you think they do, and everything you once believed is now under question. 

This might happen in a lot of different contexts, but it can happen extremely often when studying the Arabic language, which is notorious for having exceptions upon exceptions. Now, usually, it’s very clear that a given rule has a lot of exceptions, and that it should be treated more like a general guideline than an actual law. However, there are some cases where something really looks like it might be an absolute rule that you can put your trust in… until you realize it’s not.

Here are some exceptional cases for what might have appeared to be exceptionless rules…

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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?

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