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Arabic - Rules Regarding Al Hamazaat | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Questions About Your Target Languages |  | |
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5118 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes  Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 1 of 13 26 October 2010 at 10:30pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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What is your understanding of the difference between alif and alif hamza (ا وأ)? When you write them, do you go by certain rules or you think they are interchangeable?
What do you think about the following words? Correct or incorrect: 1. Commands: أكتب أدرس إفعلي 2. The definitive article: ألكتاب ألبيت ألقلم 3. Verbs or verbal nouns from form 7, 8, 9, 10: الإجتماع الإتصال إكتشفتُ إستخدمنا الإقتصاد 4. Verbs or verbal nouns from form 4: اجرى الاجراء احصائيات 5. Nouns:الانترنت اسرائيل امريكا الاردن يوم الاثنين ابو يوسف الاخ الاخت اصدقاء اركان امس ان الى الا 6. Nouns: إثنين إبن إمرأة إسم 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4984 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 2 of 13 27 October 2010 at 1:22am | IP Logged | ||||||||
There is no discussion - all your examples are incorrect; There should be an "alif with a hamza" [i.e. hamzat al-qaT`] where you wrote a "plain alif" [i.e. hamzat al-waSl] and vice versa in every case. I think you knew that :) 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5118 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 3 of 13 27 October 2010 at 5:38am | IP Logged | ||||||||
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Thanks for the reply Andrew. As far as I know they are all wrong, but others may not agree.
The topic of hamazaat is like "to/too, its/it's, there/their/they're" in English. If you know the differences you cringe every time you see them used wrong. If you ask random Arabs on the street when to write hamza and when not to, 99% of the time you get answers like however you feel like, no difference, don't know don't care... And this is why you see books, newspaper articles, and street signs full of such mistakes. The most prominent one we see everywhere on the street is "الإتصلات". My professor used to use this to illustrate the sorry state of Arabic language education in the Middle East. Here is a sentence taken from P62 of "All the Arabic You Should Have Learned":
What do you think? All correct, all incorrect, some correct, some incorrect? Edited by Cetacea on 28 October 2010 at 10:03pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Andrew C Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom naturalarabic.com Joined 4984 days ago 205 posts - 350 votes Speaks: English*, Arabic (Written) | Message 4 of 13 27 October 2010 at 8:07pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
All incorrect, except they correctly put no hamza on the definite articles as well as no hamza on الذي. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5114 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English | Message 5 of 13 27 October 2010 at 8:17pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I guess nobody is going to dispute that examples 3, 4, and 5 are definitely wrong: 3. is incorrect, because, forms 7 to 10 all have hamzat al-wasl and are preceded by a definite article 4. is incorrect, because form 4 forms with an alif always have hamzat al-qat' 5. is also incorrect because all of them must have a hamzat al-qat' However, with 1, 2 and 6 the answer is not as obvious as you might think, because if any of these words is used in isolation, it could theoretically be written with a hamza according to some textbooks, even though this is quite rare. I've only seen them written like that in word lists of Arabic textbooks. For example Schulz writes the article as ألْ (with a hamza) in his A student grammar of modern standard Arabic. (Google Books view) However, as you already mentioned, it's a sad fact that many Arabic texts contain no hamzas at all.
For textbook that is supposed to teach proper Arabic that's pretty bad, because the sentence is missing 7 Hamzas. Maybe the author wanted to prepare his students for real life texts and omitted both vowel signs and hamzas on purpose. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Cetacea Bilingual Tetraglot Groupie United States booh.com Joined 5118 days ago 80 posts - 163 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin*, Arabic (Yemeni), Arabic (Written) Studies: French | Message 6 of 13 27 October 2010 at 11:11pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
I agree. Looks like we are on the same page. The correct text should be: أشاد الرئيس كلينتون بالطيار ألامريكي الذي أنقذ بعد ستة أيام مروعة في البوسنة ووصفه بأنه بطل أمريكي ودعاه إلى البيت الأبيض
When I studied the rules of hamazaat, all the sources that I came across were consistent and clear. There is no "might, theoretically, both are acceptable" kind of talk. My sources include: Classical: The Quran, the ahadith, Al Kitab by Sibawaih (NOT our kitab AlKitab), and Lisan AlArab (Arabic-Arabic dictionary) Modern: Annahu AlWadih fi Qawa3d Allugha Alarabiyah, Arabic Grammar by W. Wright, A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic by Karin C. Ryding الموجز في قواعد اللغة العربية And based on these sources, 1, 2, and 6 are incorrect, and the only time you can write hamza on أل التعريف is when you are talking about the grammar term, not when you use it as a definite article. I am in no position to argue with Schulz who wrote the student grammar book, but I'm not convinced. Actually his inconsistency on this topic bothered me more than which side he is on. He was using أ in chapter titles and outlines, and ا within the text as if أ was the capital letter of ا.
I hear ya. It's pretty typical of authentic text to be devoid of ALL hamzas. The problem for Arabic students is that they were never taught the rules before they're thrown into the real world, so they begin confused and end years of Arabic studies confused. I've seen too many such cases. :( Edited by Cetacea on 28 October 2010 at 10:04pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kinan Diglot Senior Member Syrian Arab Republic Joined 5360 days ago 234 posts - 279 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, English Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 7 of 13 28 October 2010 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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The sentence itself is wrong:
اشاد الرئيس كلينتون بالطيار الامريكي الذي انقذ بعد ستة ايام مروعة في البوسنة ووصفه بانه بطل امريكي ودعاه غلى البيت الابيض It should be: إلى البيت الأبيض Here is the full correction: أشاد الرئيس كلينتون بالطيار الأمريكي الذي أنقذ بعد ستة أيام مروعة في البوسنة ووصفه بأنه بطل أمريكي ودعاه إلى البيت الأبيض 1 person has voted this message useful | |||||||||
| Kinan Diglot Senior Member Syrian Arab Republic Joined 5360 days ago 234 posts - 279 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, English Studies: Russian, Spanish | Message 8 of 13 28 October 2010 at 12:43pm | IP Logged | ||||||||
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In modern Arabic, it seems that hamzat are rarely written and so few people can know the right rules, so it's safer for you to not write them at all rather than writing them in wrong places.
1 person has voted this message useful |
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