Phrases and Vocabulary
Phrases
تشرّفنا بيك/تشرّفنا بيكِ  tasharrafna biik (to a male) tasharrafna biiki (to a female) reply to "tasharrafna" Literal Meaning tasharrafna تشرّفنا بيك/تشرّفنا بيكِ literally means "we are honored by you". |
تشرّفنا tasharrafna nice to meet you Literal Meaning tasharrafna تشرّفنا literally means "we are honored". |
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اسمي... ismi... My name is... Grammatical Dissection ism اسم means "name". The -i ي- at the end of ismi اسمي is the possessive pronoun "my". |
ما اسمَك؟/ما اسمِك؟ maa ismak? (to a male) maa ismik? (to a female) What is your name? Grammatical Dissection maa ما (as the vocabulary list shows) means "what" and ism اسم means "name". The -ak ﹶك at the end of ismak اسمَك is the masculine possessive pronoun "your", whereas the -ik ﹺك at the end of ismik اسمِك is the feminine possessive pronoun "your". Formal Pronunciation ما اسمُكَ؟/ما اسمُكِ؟ maa ismuka?/maa ismuki? |
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كيف نقول...؟ kayf naquul...? How do we say...? Grammatical Dissection kayf كيف means "how". naquul نقول is the we conjugation of the verb "to say". |
ماذا يعني...؟ maadha yacani...? What does...mean? Grammatical Dissection maadha ماذا means "what" and yacani يعني is the third person singular male conjugation of the verb "to mean". You may have noticed that maadha ماذا varies from the word for "what" that is presented in the vocabulary list. This is because there are two words for the interrogative "what" in Arabic: maa ما and maadha ماذا. maa ما is used in questions without verbs, and maadha ماذا is used in questions that contain verbs. |
Vocabulary
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انتِ 'anti you (f) |
انتَ 'anta you (m) |
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أنا 'ana |
ما maa what |
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و wa and The Grammar of و |
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To Vowel or Not to Vowel?
Register in AWW's Alif Baa Materials
What is a register?Register refers to the level of formality in speech. High register speech is very formal; whereas low register is very informal.
Due to the nature of Arabic, many forms of a particular phrase exist ‒ not only from one dialect to another, but from low register to high register. One of the major elements of register is grammatical voweling, which uses vowels to "mark" words according to their grammatical use in a sentence. Because fully voweled speech is less common in most speaking situations, we have chosen to present standard Arabic phrases in an unvoweled, or low register, form. Be aware that these are hybrid forms, such as are common in speech.