A harf is a word or letter that makes no sense on it’s own and there has to be an another word that comes after it in order to make sense.
We call them ‘prepositions ‘ and they show us the relation from one word to an another word.
For example: The key is IN the car.
If we say IN, ON, UNDER, FROM etc… yes the words carry a meaning but yet they do not make sense until they are put into a sentence.
There are certain characteristics of the HARF JARR in the Arabic language:
a) a preposition is a letter or a word which connects two nouns, or a noun and a verb to form a sentence;
b) it always precedes a word and never follows the word;
c) a preposition always comes before a noun and it does not come before a verb;
d) The noun following a preposition is changed from nominative case ( -un/ -u ) to genitive case ( -in/ -i )
NOTE: Jarr means pulling down, so the harf jarr that comes before a noun pulls down the case of the noun from U or UN to down I or IN ( depending of wheter a noun is definite or indefinite ) and this applies for the asmaa’ which change their last harakah ( vowel sign ) to kasrah but there are words which we will in sha’a Allah mention when we do the lesson about i’raab, which do not take a kasrah, which includes plurals, feminine, mabni etc. But we will go more into detail about this later on in sha’a Allah;
e) the noun followed by a preposition is called مَجْرُورٌ majroorun, or the one pulled down, which means that the preposition has caused a change in its case.
To illustrate the above, let us first mention some of the huroof ( plural of harf ) al jarr and then give few examples to understand better in sha’a Allah.
In lesson 4 of madinah book 1, you will see the following huroof al jarr:
عَلَى ‘alaa ( on )
فِي fee ( in )
مِنْ min ( from )
أِلَى ilaa ( to )
Now let’s build few sentences:
هُوَ فِي الْمَسْجِدِ
Huwa fee al masjidi —-> He is in the masjid.
**** If you look closely, after ‘fee’ comes the word ‘al masjid’. The original case of ‘ al masjid’ is NOMINATIVE, which means it is ‘al masjidu ‘, but now since we have a harf jarr before it, it changes this last sound -u to the sound -i
Kommentare