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- "أَمامي رَجُل غَريب."
27 Comments
I put "a strange man is in front of me" which seems like it should be okay. Marked wrong though.
My question is that why don't we use the word "hunaak" in this sentence? (2amaamii hunaak rajul ghariib). Maybe because it cannot be used together with "in front of me"? Thank you for your answer in advance!
935
You actually could use "hunaaka," but as a general rule, Arabs avoid the "hunaaka" formula when it's not necessary because it sounds redundant and inelegant.
I am not a native speaker but adding هناك sounds to me like putting emphasis on ‘there’ as if you actually pointed at the weird man.
- 935
I am a native speaker and I don't get that feeling, no. The sense of hunaaka "there is" isn't interpreted by an Arab to be an extension of the sense "there," since the syntax and intonational pattern of the two usages is different.
You are right but, as far as I know, I have no way to distinguish if this is meant to be a nominative sentence or not :'/
- 335
That's interesting, Shathu. All I can say is that, if Arabic works similarly to Russian with verbless sentences, then this would certainly be a "nominal" sentence. And in Russian, to turn this into a noun phrase ("a weird man in front of me"), you'd change the order to show that both "weird" and "in front of me" are used attributively, and are waiting, so to speak, for their predicate, eg "a weird man in front of me kept pointing a gun at everyone". Does that make sense to you?
Oh! Could your turn both arabic phrases into russian changing theorder and pointint out which is the nominal and the "non-nominal" one? It might be helpful :'D.
- 335
OK. nominal: передо мной странный человек verbal: странный человек передо мной (застрелял их) It's interesting that for the nominal sentence, Russian, like Arabic, starts with the adverbial phrase of place. But I'm not aware of these being called "nominal" sentences... Although a quick look at the internet does use the word "nominal" in relation to Russian as well as Arabic and Hebrew.
- 114
I'm not sure what you mean by nominative, but sentences in this app have a "dot" "." at the end ...so when i see a "." I try and think how can i make this into a sentence in English but trying to stay as close to the arabic words given...normally it is easy but this sentence required more work!
- 335
I suppose that's fair enough, looking out for a full stop. But I think it's always possible to work out if the Arabic is a sentence or a phrase, even if they left out the full stops! By "nominal" (not "nominative", which is something else) I mean a sentence with no verb in Arabic (and Russian, and doubtless other languages that I don't know). Sentences that are not nominal are called verbal, and that's self explanatory. But I only learned about the existence of nominal sentences when I started doing this course, because other people were using the term "nominal", which was quite new to me. I would even have said that English doesn't have nominal sentences, but I've just found this in Wikipedia: "Nominal sentences in English are relatively uncommon, but may be found in non-finite embedded clauses such as the one in "I consider John intelligent", where to be is omitted from John to be intelligent."
i think "rajul gharib amamii" might be just that. (there's been other exercises in here without using a verb, like "a hot weather" and such)
- 335
No, kobold. I understand that "أَمامي رَجُل غَريب." is a normal sentence in Arabic, a so-called nominal sentence, which doesn't require a verb. But in English, all sentences require verbs, so the translation would be incorrect if it was rendered in English as a phrase.
- 935
That would be رجل أمامي غريب. Remember that in Arabic adjectives come after the nouns they modify, and "in front of me" is simply an adjective phrase, so the rule applies here too. What's interesting here is the English, not so much the Arabic, because in English, one-word adjectives come before the noun almost always, but adjective phrases and clauses never do.
Why is "there in front of me is a weird man" wrong?" "There" has no equivalent in Arab, so I take it as an extra an add it to "in front of me".
- 935
Because this sentence does not work in English. You've got to say "There is a weird man in front of me," with the "in front of me" either all the way at the end, or possibly all the way at the start.
- 335
You could actually say, "there in front of me is a weird man", but it's not the usual order. There is nothing wrong grammatically with it, but it is marked; it sounds excited, or emphatic, or breathless.
- 935
In that case, "there" would no longer be a dummy pronoun but a demonstrative one, and that translates to a different Arabic expression.
