خَصَائِص الِاسْم الْأَرْبَع
khasa'is al-ism al-arba'
The four properties of the noun
Sarf · morphologyPart of speech (Sarf)core term
Also written: Properties of the noun · Ism properties
In one line
The four properties of the noun
What it is
Every Arabic ism carries four properties at once — definiteness, gender, number, and i'rab — and three of them you already use in English without thinking. “The kings” is definite, masculine, plural; “a book” is indefinite and singular. Arabic simply asks you to state these openly on the word. Only the fourth, i'rab — the changing case-ending — is genuinely new, and it is the one that unlocks how a sentence fits together.
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From the free course The Language of Quran — Easier than English (Book 1) (LoQ1), taught by Ustad Muhammad Arjan Ali.