Arabic Grammar Inna and its Sisters إنّ و أخواتها

Ahlan! Right now, we're going to talk about special group of words in Arabic called 'Inna and its Sisters,' 'إنّ وأخواتها' in Arabic. You may have already studied another group of words, 'Kaana and its Sisters,' which function in similar but not identical way, in terms of how they dictate sentence structure and appropriate case endings in formal Arabic. Here are six of the Sisters of إنّ that you might encounter. إنّ Itself is particle that's kind of difficult to translate in English, and in fact often we don't, but it's Usually added at the beginning of sentence to draw the reader's attention to the importance of it. Sometimes if you read, for example an old translation pf an Arabic text, they will translate إنّ as 'verily,' or 'forsooth,' or something like that. But often these days, إنّ Is not necessarily even translated as word into English from Arabic. It just doesn't have function in English the way it does in Arabic. كأنَّ eans 'as though,' or 'as if,' when, we're sort of saying that things seem to be certain way. لأنّ ,is word that you probably know 'because.' You've already been using it and now we're going to learn little more about its grammar and the ways that it affects formal sentences. لكنّ is variant of لكن or, ولكن which you already know, and its meaning is entirely synonymous. It just means 'but.' لعلّ can be used to express 'perhaps,' possibility, or maybe hope or fear about something, you know 'perhaps he's in his house,' 'perhaps I'll get to travel to Beirut this summer,' and لَيتَ conveys meaning of wishing for the impossible. Kind of like 'if only' in English. 'If only you were here,' 'if only the أستاذ hadn't made the test so long and hard.' Things of that nature. So all of these particles must be followed in Formal Arabic by جملة اسمية, nominal sentence. Remember that جملة اسمية is formed of two parts in its most basic form. المبتدأ والخبر. The subject and the predicate. So here is جملة اسمية but when we have an إنّ sentence, or sentence with another sister of إنّ, the terminology changes little bit. Let's just start with جملة اسمية so that we can see the comparison. If we said, my favorite example sentence, الأستاذ غريب. 'The professor is strange.' That's جملة اسمية, and the مبتدأ comes first, and then the خبر, and both the مبتدأ and the خبر are in the مرفوع case. So we would Have 'Damma' over the definite مبتدأ, and then 'Damma tanwiin' over the indefinite خبر. الأستاذُ غريبٌ is how we would pronounce it, fully vocalized, in formal Arabic. Now, suppose that we wanted some real Arabic style here, and we wanted to say 'Yea, verily say unto you, the professor is strange,' we could begin that sentence with إنّ. But then in terms of the terminology the nomenclature, we would change things little bit. We still Have the same words, it can still work, but instead of referring to the subject here as مبتدأ, we would refer to it as اسم إنّ. If we were using another one of these particles, we would say it اسم كأنّ, اسم لكنّ, or whatever the case may be and then this would be خبر إنّ. You might recognize this, again, as very similar to the terminology that we use to talk about nominal sentence that comes after كان and one of its sisters, except that it's اسم إنّ and خبر إنّ instead of اسم كان and خبر كان. The other little difference Is that After إنّ or one of it's sisters, the اسم is always منصوب, not مرفوع ,and then the خبر is مرفوع. So in this case, اسم إنّ would need to be منصوب with 'fatha,' and then خبر إنّ would still be مرفوع. Again, we're not likely to see these markings in normal text, newspaper article, novel, anything like that. But when we are reading formal Arabic aloud, when we're speaking formal Arabic, it's important to know that these structures change just little bit. you might also recognize this as the opposite of what happens in 'kaana' and it's sisters. In that case, we would have the اسم be مرفوع, and the خبر be منصوب but here, it's simply reversed. So let's look at couple more examples. If we wanted to say 'he likes California because the weather is beautiful.' يحبّ كالفورنيا... If were reading it quickly without case endings, would say, okay, يحبّ كالفورنيا لأنّ الطقس جميل. But here, we want the إعراب. Okay, we have what would be جملة اسمية, and now here, if wanted to just mark it up and determine which words were serving which functions, would say that this is اسم لأنّ, the subject of the sentence that comes after لأنّ, and then here is خبر لأنّ And again, اسم لأنّ is always going to be منصوب, so I'm going to add 'fatha' here, and then خبر لأنّ is مرفوع, once again. Oops, lost my chalk. If we wanted to Say 'perhaps the employees are around, we could express it this way: لعلّ... Now here, we need to think about the regular plural ending, and the way it's going to change in منصوب. If it were مرفوع, we would say موظّفون but because اسم لعلّ needs to be منصوب, we would need to change that to موظّفين, so, we could say لعلّ الموظّفين... One way to say 'here' or 'present' or 'around' is موجود, so in the plural, would add my regular plural, but موجود would need to be مرفوع because it is خبر of لعلّ so لعلّ الموظّفين موجودون. With my nice مرفوع ending there. And again, here would be my اسم and here would be my خبر. اسم لعلّ and خبر لعلّ. One wrinkle that you should be aware of is that in all of these cases, after any of these particles, sometimes we want to begin nominal sentence with pronoun and not regular noun, so perhaps, we already know that we're talking about الموظّفين in this case, and we wanted to just say 'maybe they're around, perhaps they're around. In that case, we would attach pronoun suffix to لعلّ that works just like the pronoun suffixes that you know, the possessive suffixes, and we could say لعلّهم موجودون. And with the pronoun suffixes, we don't need to worry about marking case. We know that theoretically, because the هم functions as the اسم of لعلّ, it is منصوب, but we aren't going to change the vowels in any way to make that manifest. It's just understood. One last thing. Sometimes for reasons of style, someone might want to use verb directly after إنّ or one of its sisters, in which case you can insert kind of dummy pronoun, placeholder pronoun, attached to إنّ or one of its sisters, and that pronoun is always going to be ه, the masculine singular third-person variant. So if we wanted to Say 'They said that the windows were smashed,' we could express it this way: قالوا إنّه كُسرَت الشبابيك. Now here, we have passive verb, and شبابيك is the subject of that passive verb, so this هو doesn't refer to specific grammatically masculine individual or object that smashed the windows. We just know that the windows were smashed, and we haven't attributed an actor to that action. So more than anything else, you should be prepared to encounter that in reading, if you're reading text in Arabic, and you see ه there, it could refer to هو that is the subject of new sentence, or it could just be kind of placeholder pronoun that lets the writer get straight to the verb that they consider the important part of the sentence. And that is إنّ and its sisters!