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- "عِنْد شادي بَيْت."
20 Comments
897
"How many" = كم and "what" = ماذا. You're probably confused because we ask كَمِ السَّاعَةُ؟ "how many is the hour?" when we ask for the time in Arabic.
897
In Arabic, we don't have verb "to have." Instead, we say what literally translates to "At X is Y." to say that "X has Y." Since we don't use verb "to be" in the present tense, we just have "At X Y." So "At=3inda X=shaadii Y=bayt."
897
In Arabic, we don't pronounce short vowels at the end of words when those words are alone or when they come at the very end of an utterance. So, when you say "3inda" and nothing else, you pronounce it "3ind." But in the middle of an actual sentence, it's "3inda."
I'm just a beginner, but A.S. Tritton (Arabic. Teach Yourself Books, p. 35), indicates three ways, one of which is with the preposition عند. Another is through the preposition من. Another is the usual way in Semitic languages, viz. by appending a suffix to a noun. Here's a link to the latter: http://www.languageguide.org/arabic/grammar/possession.jsp Apparently there are other ways, such as the famous expression الإضَافَةُ. There's a ton of information on the internet on this subject but it's too advanced for me at this point.
18
I think the -un sound only comes at the end of a subject. Bayt is not the subject here. Maybe it's because a its a name that is the subject, you don't add the -un?
897
It's actually a subject, believe it or not! The sentence literally says "At Shadi is a house." The house is the thing that is at Shadi, so it's the grammatical subject. If it were an object, it would have still ended in -an, but the reason it's not "baytun" is that at the end of an utterance, we don't pronounce word endings (at least the ones that are indicated only by diacritics and not letters).
You are right about "Shadi" not receiving grammatical endings, but that's because it ends in a long "ii" sound, and that sound has its own rules in this regard. But other names can receive endings.
727
Why this word order and not with Shadi at the beginning? Other sentences start with the subject