Adjective in Arabic
It’s about time to go over adjectives and see their forms and functions in Arabic.
As we mentioned earlier, adjectives directly follow the noun and agree with it in gender, number, case, and definiteness.
Here are some examples:
When looking at sentences in Arabic, we’ve already seen the equational sentence (the one without a verb). In these cases, we can use an adjective to provide more context about the subject.
For example:
Similar to nouns, adjectives in Arabic have a base form for the masculine singular.
For the feminine, they usually add ـة (ta marbuTa).
They also change for the dual and for the plural, which can take either a sound plural (masculine or feminine) or a broken plural.
Let’s look at some examples of adjectives in their different forms (masculine, feminine, dual, and plural):
As you can see, feminine singular adjectives are used to modify both feminine singular nouns and nonhuman plural nouns.
Let’s take a closer look. The word بيت (bayt – house) in Arabic, like in any language, refers to something nonhuman. It makes sense, humans live inside it, but the house itself is not a human.
That’s why when we say “beautiful houses”, we say بيوت جميلة (buyut jamyla).
بيوت (buyut) is the plural of بيت (bayt).
جميلة (jamyla) is the feminine singular form of جميل (jamyl).
Even though the noun is plural, Arabic grammar requires the feminine singular adjective for nonhuman plurals.
Case and definiteness must still be in agreement with the noun, but the adjective remains in the feminine singular form.
