The verb
A فِعْل (fi'l) is a word that describes an action — and it never describes one without also fixing it in time: past, present or future. That is the whole difference between a verb and an ism. An ism means something; a verb means something and tells you when.
The definition
Every Arabic verb carries two things
An Arabic verb is never only the action. Packed inside the same word is a ضَمِير (damir) — a pronoun — telling you who did it: the person, the gender and the number of the one carrying out the action.
So نَصَرْتُ (nasartu) is two pieces of information in one word.
| The word | What it is | In English |
|---|---|---|
| نَصَرَ | the action | helped |
| تُ | the pronoun | I — first person, singular |
| نَصَرْتُ | both together | I helped |
English needs two words where Arabic needs one. This is why an Arabic verb can be a whole sentence by itself.
This section settles two questions — when the action happened, which is Tense, and whether the doer is named, which is Voice.
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