"بَيْتهُ قَريب مِن بَيْتها."
Translation:His house is close to her house.
24 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
Just wondering why we have the 'i' sound in 'bayt-i-hu' and 'bayt-i-ha'. Because of the speed of the sentences it can sometimes be a little difficult to tell if I'm hearing the words correctly.
In this sentence, the i sound in 'bayt-i-ha' is correct, unlike in 'bayt-i-hu' which's supposed to be pronounced as 'baytuhu'. That's because 'baytuhu' is at the beginning of the sentence (the nominative case), and 'bayt-i-ha' is preceded by مِنْ 'min' which's one of many Arabic prepositions that require the word that follows to have the i sound, which's كسرة kasra. (the genitive case).
Check the case lesson for more information.
1622
You're not wrong, but two things are worth noting:
"baytihu" is valid dialectal Classical Arabic, but in MSA, only "baytihi" is encountered. The clitic pronouns -hu, -hum, -hunna change their -u to -i when attached to a word that ends in an -i sound. Vowel harmony lite!
And it's weird that you said "one of many Arabic prepositions." ALL Arabic prepositions are followed by the genitive; in fact, we literally call them حروف جر "genitivizing particles" in Arabic grammar. That whole "which preposition takes which case" thing is one thing you can completely forget about when learning Arabic. You're welcome.
- 1010
I thanked you a year ago, M_Alrehaily, but I observe today that you write the contraction "which's" for "which is". This happens not to be one that is used by native English speakers. Possibly because the consonant cluster "ch-s" seems harder to pronounce than the original "-ch is". So we always write it out in full: "which is". But this is two years after you wrote your post, so you may have already left Duolingo...
- 1264
'His house is next to hers' wasn't accepted. How would you say that in Arabic then? Thank you!
"his house is next to her house" just sounds awful, because of the repetition of "house". I think that, to make the English idiomatic, the answer should be "his house is next to hers". And this is regardless of whether "his house is next to her house" and "his house is next to hers" have different Arabic translations: these two seem, in English, to have the same meaning, but the first sounds much clumsier than the second.
"His house is close from her house" wasn't accepted, But "من" means "from" as I learned in previous lessons.
- 1010
SyedOmar, languages can never be translated completely word for word. Evidently, Arabic says "close from" not "close to" as in English. Russian also says "close from" (близко от), and French says "close of" (près de). I expect other people can give other different examples from languages I don't know. We can't demand that they all follow the same pattern!
As prepositions, both "close to" and "near" can be synonymous. Please correct me if I am wrong :))
Why does the feminine version بيتها Have alif at the end and the masculine does not have waw?
- 1622
Because the vowel at the end of 'baytuhaa' is long, and the vowel at the end of 'baytuhu' is short. Before silence, the pronunciation of 'baytuhaa' is going to remain the same, but 'baytuhu' will just be pronounced 'baytuh.'
- 1622
It's a bit of a Briticism that the course contributors might not be familiar with. Report it next time.
