Arabic for Godless Heathens: Part IV

Ana Ismee Schendo

Possession is a scary thing.  And not just the head-spinning, vomit spewing type familiar from late night horror flicks.  Linguistic possession can be a scary thing too.  Although it may be calm on the surface, the my, yours, or its relationship conceals more theory killers than Camp Crystal Lake.

I hope to spend a lot of time discussing possession in this blog.  At the moment, however, we shall take a look at the basics of possession and how it can be expressed differently in English and Arabic.  For this, we'll start with something everyone has: a name.

Languages disagree on which noun, the Possessor or the Possessed, should “carry” the information about the possession relationship.   For example in English, we change the Possessor, but not the Possessed:

My	name
Your	name
His	name
Her	name
Its	name

As you can see, “name” is the same, no matter whose it is.  Arabic, like many other languages, changes the Possessed noun instead:

I	name+my
You_he	name+yours_he
You_she	name+yours_she
He	name+his
She	name+hers

Remember from the last post that Arabic has two You-words, depending on the sex of the person being talked to, and no It-word.  Using a rather informal transcription of Arabic, this system gives us the following forms for name (“ism”):

ismee	"my name"
ismek	"your (male) name"
ismik	"your (female) name"
ismuh	"his name"
ismahaa	"her name"

Of course, since the Arabic alphabet does not ordinarily write short vowels “ismek” and “ismik” are spelled exactly the same way.  The Possessor noun does not change:

Ana	ismee	Schendo
I	my name	Schendo

"My name is Schendo"

So far, we've seen two examples of how the possession relationship can be shown.  English changes the way the Possessor noun is pronounced, and Arabic adds a suffix onto the Possessed noun.  There are logically two other ways left: (1) change both or (2) change neither.  But, that's another post.