Some Arabic revision

Part 1

9th of January, 2026

As a fun treat, because it’s something I’ve long wanted to do, I’ve been taking Arabic classes once a week during term times. In lieu of any mathematical updates, I’m using this blog post as an excuse to do some revision before classes start again next month. Today is nominal sentences. I doubt this will be a particularly useful resource to anybody else (and hopefully it’s very clear that I’m a very beginner beginner), since it’s not a tutorial so much as a collection of my random class notes. But 2026 is the year of not worrying about such things when it comes to stuff I do in my spare time.

Nominal sentences

The bread and butter of conversation consists of pointing at things and then saying stuff about those things. In English, we do this with the verb “to be”, suitably conjugated:

• The house is big
• My notebook is blue
• There be dragons

In Arabic, however, we express this without using any verb whatsoever, instead using nominal sentences. As a step towards understanding these, I like to first rephrase the above examples as questions and answers:

• The house? Big
• My notebook? Blue
• There? Dragons

In the language of nominal sentences, the “question” part is called the subject, and the “answer” part the predicate.

One thing that you might note in the examples above is that the subject is always definite, i.e. we always talk about a specific thing (“the house”, my notebook”) instead of a general one (“a house”, “some notebooks”). It’s important that the predicate agrees with the subject in three out of four ways: in number, gender, and case (we’ll talk about these later), but not in definiteness. If we make the predicate definite as well (so كبير becomes الكبير), then what we get is a phrase, not a complete sentence: