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1. Mood in Arabic grammar The term ‘mood’ in Western grammars of Standard and Classical Arabic applies to the ‘imperfect’ or ‘prefixed’ verbal stem - qtul- and its four endings - u, -a, -Ø (zero), and - an(na). (The full paradigms are given in Table 2, and the prefixes for grammatical person are discussed in Table 1.) The form ya-qtul-u ‘he kills/will kill’ (hyphens separate morphemes) serves as the present/future tense in direct opposition to the past or perfect tense stem qatal-. The same ya-qtul-u is called indicative or ‘realis’ mood in contrast to the two ‘irrealis’ moods, subjunctive ya…

  1. General Arabic is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic family of languages; it is the official language of the 22 nations of the Arab world, the area bounded by the Atlantic on the west, the Mediterranean on the north, the Sahara on the south, and the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq on the east; it is spoken by more than two hundred million people. Modern Standard Arabic is the High literary form of Arabic that goes back to the literary language of pre-Islamic Arabia (poetic koine; Classical Arab…