Aliph Lam are the two letters that make up the ubiquitous AL everything in Arabic. In general, it is the definite article, their equivalent of our “the”. Of course it isn’t as easy as just sticking AL in front of a word you want to make definite, there are different rules you have to follow. Today’s class was all about the correct placement of AL… Take these English sentences for example:
This is a beautiful house.
This is the beautiful house.
This house is beautiful.
This beautiful house is mine.
All of them are similar but have slight differences in meaning, mostly due to the placement of the definite article. It gets a little more tricky in Arabic because the verb “to be” is not used in the present tense, so the definite article also serves the purpose of pointing out where the (assumed) verb is. So the first sentence literally translated is:
This house beautiful.
The second sentence literally translated is:
This the house the beautiful.
The third sentence:
This the house beautiful.
I’m doing Ok with the rules, but the slight shading of the meaning is making my head spin. In other words, I can write and speak them OK, but I get confused by the meaning. I’ve got all of tomorrow off (Amin has to do something), so I’m hoping that I can figure it out and use “sadiqy aliph lam” properly soon…