Ahlan wa sahlan. Right now we're going to talk about how to form 'nisba'
adjectives. 'Nisba' adjectives are adjectives that are formed by adding
'yaa-shadda,' or 'yaa-shadda' plus a 'taa marbuuTa,' depending on whether we're
talking about something masculine or feminine.
They're usually derived from place names or 'names of affiliation,' a lot of proper
nouns. You've probably encountered a few already, things like قهوة عربيّة,
where we have that 'yaa-taa marbuuTa,' 'Arab coffee,' or 'Arabic coffee,'
or maybe الأدب الإنجليزيّ, 'English literature,' where we have that 'yaa'
referring to 'English,' something of or pertaining to English as a language. So
right now we're going to talk about how we derive these forms. What we do is we
take a name--again usually a proper noun of place or affiliation--we remove 'taa marbuuTa'
or 'yaa-taa marbuuTa,' 'alif-laam' if there's a
definite article, and any final 'alif' or 'yaa-alif,' and then we add
'yaa' or 'yaa-taa marbuuTa,' we just need to remember to remove those extraneous
parts, and then we add that 'yaa' or 'yaa-taa marbuuTa,' which tells us that we have
now an adjective, instead of a noun. So for example, if we take السّعودية,
Saudi Arabia, we're going to remove that 'alif-laam,' we're going to remove that
'yaa-taa marbuuTa,' and then we're going to take our stem, so if we were referring
to something masculine that was 'Saudi,' we use the same word in English, we would
then have سعودي. This shadda that tends to be emphasized more when formal Arabic is
being spoken or read aloud, سعوديّ. In most spoken Arabic it tends to be a
little bit softer, but it's a good habit to get into writing the 'shadda' on all of
your 'nisba' adjectives just to remember that they're there. Or for
example if we take
الأردن, Jordan' we're going to go' through our steps. What do we need to
remove? We have an 'alif-laam,' so we're going to remove that. So if we wanted to
talk about a Jordanian woman, for example, we would say أردنيّة.
'yaa, taa marbuuTa.' Or if we take أمريكا--this can be a tricky one, right,
because we don't actually have 'alif laam,' we only have that initial 'alif.' So
we're not going to remove it, it's not an article that we need to get rid of, but
we do have 'alif,' so we're going to take that stem that we have left, so if
we were talking about 'American literature,' for example, الأدب, when we
write الأدب الأمريكي. This is an important point. Remember when we were
talking about adjective agreement with 'alif-laam,' how our adjective needs to be
definite as well? Forming a 'nisba' is one thing, but we have to think about the
grammatical context in which it occurs. So in Arabic when we refer to a general
concept like 'literature,' for example, it's usually definite, so we're talking about
the totality of American literature. الأدب الأمريكي. Or one last
example:
موريتانيا. Here we have to remember that we're going to remove final 'alif' if it's
there, or final 'yaa-alif' if it's there. So we're left with this stem. So if we
wanted to talk about 'the president of Mauritania' for example, or 'a Mauritanian president,'
we would say رئيس موريتاني.