"اَلْباب باب."
Translation:The door is a door.
64 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
758
Interesting sentence.
Reads as "the door door". Confusing at first, but highlights that Arabic may have neither a copula ("A is B") nor an indefinite article ("a door").
893
How would you say 'The door is beautiful'? Would it be...
الـباب جميل.
How will it differ from 'The beautiful door'?
1793
Yes, you are right. The door is beautiful: الباب جميل
The beautiful door just gets the definite article at the attributive adjective.: الباب الجميل
My understanding is most newspapers and books dont have diacritics so the spoken dialects dont add extra vowels at the end because they don't know they should.
So al-baabu reads as al-bab. No way to know its baabu other than knowing standard arabic.
Now I am thinking this course is less modern standard arabic and more like Saudi spoken dialect. Anyone know what dialect this is?
Correct. If they had given less strange examples like "The door is beautiful", immediately the crowd wisdom out here starts debating why does it not mean "The beautiful door?"
Check other questions on the Arabic modules. It is full of such discussions. All because they did not understand the basic equational sentence structure.
Hope you don't fall into that trap of ignoring grammar labelling it strange; and understand this equational sentence properly.
Regards.
@Charlotte - The door is a door" is an equational sentence and makes perfect sense grammatically (which is why we are here... To learn the grammar :-)
Once you understand this grammar construct, you can go on to make sentences like "The man is a teacher" (replace 'The door' with 'The man' الرجل, and 'a door' with 'a teacher' مدرس).
Hope this helps.