Foundations
Arabic, like every written language, has an alphabet. Its letters come together to form words, and words come together to form phrases and sentences.
Any sound a person utters that is made of letters is called لَفْظ (lafẓ) — an “utterance” — and because it is made of letters it can be written down. But an utterance may be meaningful, مَوْضُوع (mawḍūʿ), or meaningless, مُهْمَل (muhmal).
The science of Arabic grammar deals only with the meaningful. In simple terms, grammar is the study of how words are brought together to form meaningful phrases and sentences.
When two or more meaningful words come together and give an additional meaning, they are called a مُرَكَّب (murakkab) — a construct.
A grammatically sound murakkab is only ever one of two kinds.
| Which means | ||
|---|---|---|
| مُرَكَّب تَامّ | Complete | it conveys a full meaning — a sentence |
| مُرَكَّب نَاقِص | Incomplete | it means something, but does not form a full sentence |
Everything else in this guide hangs off that division.
Arabic has only three types of word, essentially two types of sentence, and six phrases you will meet again and again.
| 3 | types of word | ism · fiʿl · ḥarf — section B |
| 2 | types of sentence | nominal and verbal — section C |
| 6 | common phrases | section D |
These are what you meet in any Arabic text. Master these foundational structures and you have the key that unlocks the language.
This section needs only two pages: the word, and the construct. The two kinds of construct each become a section of their own — the phrase in section D, the sentence in section C.
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