Arabic Grammar 18 maa of exclamation

Mar7aba! Right now want to talk about one way to express exclamation in Arabic using the particle ما In fact, we call it, in this structure, ما التعجّبية, sort of 'the "maa" of exclamation.' We can take ما and then modify version of whatever adjective or quality the thing we're describing has, to turn sentence from something little bit pedestrian: "the cake is delicious," to something that expresses little more enthusiasm and emotional energy. "How very delicious this cake is!" Suppose... My favorite example sentence... we had very strange professor. We could just say الأستاذ غريب "The professor is strange." But if we really want to emphasize how very strange that أستاذ is, we can take our adjectives that put it into modified pattern. Here we have غريب and we're going to put it into the pattern, the وزن أفعَل After ما, so We go from الأستاذ غريب, take غريب, find its جذر, 'ghayn-raa-baa' and turn it into this: ما أغرب الأستاذ! "How strange that professor is!" Sometimes think of this construction as the Little Red Riding Hood construction. If you know the story of Little Red Riding Hood, there's point where she's looking at wolf, and she's saying, "My, how big your ears are! My, how sharp your teeth are!" and that's exactly what we're expressing when we use construction. "How strange the أستاذ is!" That's it. It's pretty simple structure, really. There are couple of things you might wish to know. First, know that that أفعَل form isn't going to change ever based on the gender or number of what we're describing. It's going to stay exactly like that, which keeps our lives simple. Also notice that it is correct style in Arabic to put an exclamation point, which we call علامة التعجّب at the end of the sentence. You might even argue that it's wrong to leave that exclamation point out. In English, of course, you might have been told that exclamation points can be poor style. But in Arabic is very correct to use an explanation point there. Third, although this pattern, أفعل،أغرب looks very similar to the أفعَل التفضيل that superlative construction that you probably know, it is in fact verb. form IV verb, so we might think of it, in an attempt to kind of square the circle, as being sort of rhetorical question: "who or what made the أستاذ so very strange?" ما أغرب الأستاذ؟ "What is the source of the strangeness?" Or what 'stranged,' what 'strangeified' the professor? Functionally, that's exactly how it's going to look, it's going to look very similar to the superlative construction. And if that helps you conceptualize it, there's no harm in maintaining those associations, but know that it is little bit different. Finally, because this is verb, its object is going to be منصوب. In this case with 'fatha.' So if we are reading fully vocalized text aloud or if you're preparing something to be spoken aloud in very formal context, that will be important to remember. Let's take some other examples. البناية جميلة 'The building is beautiful.' Fine. But if we're standing in front of beautiful building, we might say instead ما and then take أفعَل, find the جذر of جميل and say ما أجملَ البناية with our exclamation point at the end. Another example, البقلاوة لذيذة This one is bit trickier, because we need to remember how doubled root letters work, but the principle is absolutely the same. You can say ما ألذَّ البقلاوة With 'shadda' so that the two 'dhaals' can cohabitate together. Finally if we want to say, "Ali is so very very nice," we could say علي لطيف Or we could say ما ألطفَ... And here again remember all of these are منصوب with 'fatha,' and Ali, because we don't have an alif-laam, is actually going to take تنوين, like this: ما ألطفَ علياً Because we need that منصوب ending in formal Arabic. And this would actually be case where we would need to represent it visually, even in an unvocalized text, because of that 'alif.' So now you know how to exclaim about things in Arabic!