ADJECTIVES

               

Unlike English Arabic adjectives follow the noun they modify, which is somehow easier, because when you start with the noun first you will easily modify the adjective that comes afterwards accordingly either to its masculine, feminine, dual or plural form.

A small house: baitun sagheer بيت صغير (literally house small).

Just like Spanish & German …, Arabic has masculine and feminine adjective forms, we learned in a previous lesson how to form the feminine from masculine in nouns, same steps will be taken to form feminine adjectives too.

Let’s go over the rule of forming feminine from masculine form, which includes feminine adjectives with some:

In Arabic to form a feminine adjective from the masculine, you simply add “taa’ marbuta” which looks like ((ة, ــة to the end of the adjective… for example:

Arabic Adjectives

Big: Kabeer كبير  (masculine)  Big: kabeera  كبيرة (feminine) Small: Sagheer صغير (masculine)  Small: sagheera صغيرة (feminine) Beautiful: Jameel جميل (masculine)  Beautiful: jameela   جميلة(feminine)

Note that adding the “taa’ marbuta  ة, ــة ”  is not always the case to form the feminine of a masculine adjective. There are some exceptions to this:

Colors and most adjectives starting with “a” “ أ ” for example take in most cases a different form, which is represented in this model word  (?a??aa’), the steps to model our feminine irregular adjective is: extract the consonants from the masculine adjective and place them respectively in the place of the question marks, here are some examples:

Blue  azraq أزرق (masculine)  zrq (raw consonants)  (?a??aa’) raw model  zarqaa’  زرقاء (after replacing the ??? with the consonants)

Dumb  abkam أبكم (masculine)  bkm (raw consonants)  (?a??aa’) raw model  bakmaa’ بكماء (after replacing the ??? with the consonants)

Dual Adjectives in Arabic:

To form a dual masculine adjective in Arabic we simply add “aan” “ان ” to the end of the adjective, note that you can do that even with adjectives starting with “a” “ أ ”,

Big  kabeer كبير  (masculine singular)  Big   kabeeraan  كبيران (masculine dual)

Blue  azraq أزرق (masculine singular)  Blue  azraqaan أزرقان (masculine dual)

To form a dual feminine adjective add “ataan” “ تان ” to the masculine adjective:

Big  kabeer كبير  (masculine singular)  Big   kabeerataan  كبيرتان (feminine dual)

For adjectives starting with “a” “ أ ” the dual feminine will take the “?a??awataan” form, by replacing the question marks with our consonants:

Blue  azraq أزرق (masculine singular)  Blue  zarqawaan زرقاوان (feminine dual) (after replacing the “?” of ?a??awataan with azraq consonants)

Plural adjective in Arabic:

The way to form a plural adjective is the same way you form a plural noun, we already discussed that in a separate (forming the plural)

Just remember that the adjective follows the noun, and not the opposite like in English.

Good: jayyed  جيد

Bad: sayye’  سيء