Morphology

Today is Egyptian Labor Day. I welcome this day off because I have been feeling very overwhelmed lately. There seems to have been lots and lots of tedious little rules in Arabic introduced to me this 2nd half of the semester that I haven't yet felt I have completely down. It is such a rich language with so many little things that matter so much, so I welcomed this day off, so I can do a little review over the past several weeks of grammar rules.

At the moment I'm in the middle of studying Morphology. This is how the words morph into other meanings. This is one of the things that makes arabic so hard for westerners to learn b/c we have nothing to compare it to b/c there is nothing like it in our language family.
The closest comparison I have been able to come up with is last names. Last names are a recent invention I've heard that most of them were founded on family trades like Baker Shoemaker etc etc or founded on special meanings. then many of the got letters added on or dropped and transliterated into words easier to pronounce in areas of the world people moved to. So, now many times it's not easy to trace a name back to it's origin so we can look them up in books and find really cool meanings for them.
Well, that is kind of how the entire language of Arabic is. It's kinda fun, interesting, and hard.
There are 10 verb forms and I have learned 5 of them so far. The forms I have learned are reflexive and causative; meaning, they either mean someone or somthings is doing it to itself(reflexive) or someone or something is forcing someone or somthing else to do it(causative)

It is very fascinating that the very for study also means to teach. If the same root is plugged into form 1 it means to make yourself learn ie to study or if the root is plugged into form 2 it means to make someone else to learn ie to teach.
Not all the words can be traced back this easily and Arabs are like anyone else wherein they learn the language growing up so the words just 'sound right' they are not consciously plugging them into different forms--there are slight and not so slight differences in writing and pronunciation between the forms so they are different word that mean completely different things---but to us foreigners we have to learn to system to make sense of it and be able to learn how the language works to be able to use it properly.

It's interesting to sit in class and have the teacher give us a verb in form one like 'to be' and ask us what we think it means in form 2 and we think real hard then figure out it means 'to create' or a word like 'to get out(leave)' and in another form it means to extract or copy. Also, each verb has a form where a noun in derived like to sit can also mean to make someone else sit down and also can be a noun 'sitting'. Lot's of stuff to learn....

Morphology makes me understand how so many people esp. Arabs love linguistics. They can trace these word straight to their original source and it usually has a rich and profound meaning since the major source of Arabic is from the Quran. For example, the verbs used to express 'to speak' 'to talk' 'to discuss' etc... are words related to the sacredness of words b/c words are very sacred in Islamic texts, so many of the roots and sources of these verbs are meanings like to pierce straight to the heart like a dagger or other deep positive and negative meanings to express the different effects words have on people.

very interesting stuff.