Starting with what you know, moving towards what you don’t

In English, we form a sentence by putting together a subject and a predicate. 

The subject tells you who or what the sentence is about. For instance, “the dog,” “the criminal charges,” “Moira,” “Hussein,” “it,” “him,” or “her.” 

The predicate tells you what the subject is or what the subject is doing. For instance, “The criminal charges are filed”, “Moira is a dentist,” or “He studies 10 new Mandarin words every day.” In this case, “are filed”, “is a dentist” and “studies 10 new Mandarin words every day” tell you either what the subject is or what the subject does.

In English, we need a verb to form a full sentence, also known as a complete thought. Without it, there are too many questions about the thought itself. “The criminal charges [blank] filed.” Because of the nature of storytelling and culture, we can ask, “Are you saying the criminal charges were filed?” which implies that a new chain of events have started that can’t be taken back. We could ask, “Are you using saying “The criminal charges will be filed.” in which case you could ask whether you’re being threatened by legal action or promised legal action. 

On its own, “the criminal charges filed” is not a complete thought, because criminal charges do not file themselves, so they cannot take the action of filing. By the way, while something might work creatively (for instance, a cartoon of criminal charges jumping up off a desk and filing themselves), it does not work logically, and logic works within the realm of what we’ve demonstrated is true as a society. Keep in mind that there is a social component to even the most hard sciences, but we will talk about this in another post.)

On the other hand, in Arabic, you can form what’s known as “nominal sentences.” These are sentences that do not need a verb. They still have specific rules to ensure that conversations stay grounded in reality, but if you’re used to always looking for the verb in a sentence, this may be unusual to you. If you have short hands that you use within your family, your friend group, or your community, while it has meaning there, it may not be considered logical or meaningful in contexts where evidence and logic are used to make decisions (such as the legal and medical realms) unless there are experts who are willing to take risks for you or people from that group who understand all of the dynamics and all of the possible “shared understandings” that you were operating from. 

Key Takeaway: In English, you need a subject + a predicate (which requires a verb) to form a complete thought. In Arabic, you can form a complete thought without a verb by speaking or writing what’s known as a nominal sentence. 

Sentences without verbs aka nominal sentences in Arabic

The first thing to understand is that there are no “is” sentences in Arabic. While there is a verb (كَانَ) that you can use for past tense sentences, such as “She was…” or “You were”, for these nominal sentences, we’re going to focus on the present tense, and كَانَ is not used for the present tense. This means that a sentence like, “The House blue” is valid (valid means logically true), unlike English where “The house blue” is not valid.

You get a nominal sentence when you combine a definite noun with an indefinite adjective. Let’s find a definite noun and an indefinite adjective. 

Our definite noun is المطر which means “the rain.” 

Our indefinite adjective is بارد which means “cold.” 

If we combine the definite noun with the indefinite adjective this is what we get:

المطر بارد.

This means: “The rain is cold.” even though there is no “is” in between the two words. 

You can build variations of nominal sentences using more adjectives and other elements, like prepositions, but we’ll cover that in another blog post.