"هُناك كِتاب صَغير وَوِشاح كَبير في شَنْطَتي."
Translation:There is a small book and a big scarf in my bag.
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1014
That's only because these Semitic languages are agglutinative, ie they glue words together such as the possessive pronoun, plus they don't have an indefinite article or the verb "to be" in the present, etc. It's not like when a good writer is compact thanks to a judicious choice of words...
To which formal texts are you referring? The subject of this sentence is the duo of book and scarf, and the plurality of that compound subject dictates the verb. On the table are an A and a B; in my bag are a scarf and a book; in my bag there are a scarf and a book. (Cf. There, in my bag, are a scarf and a book. A scarf and a book are there, in my bag. There is a scarf, and there is a book, in my bag. There are a scarf and a book, in my bag. There are a scarf and a book in my bag.)
1014
kokagejone, your very first sentence shows you have a predilection for (over?)formal English. It would be more natural to end that sentence with the preposition "to". And giving " On the table are an A and a B" loses sight of the fact that in "There is an A and a B on the table", the first word - "there" - is "an indefinite subject with no real meaning", as described in the excellent link provided by phuvtuo below.
Nope unfortunately you are wrong, to use " there are" there would have to be more than one book and more than one scarf....e.g.
There are 2 books and 2 scarves.
There is one book and one scarf is short for " there is one book and there is one scarf.
I know it's not very easy to understand but hey ho!
538
I wrote 'small' instead of short in the previous sentence.............it was wrong so i became smarter ! I wrote 'short' instead of 'small' in this one.................the rest can be assumed. I'm starting to guess that I could do a better job in building this course then the intellectuals who are doing it, though i've never spoken a bit of arabic in my life (¬_¬")