Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2024 August 8

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August 8

Two forms of Arabic location

As of my current spot in the Duolingo Arabic course, there are two ways of noting that an indefinite object exists at a certain location. The first one I encountered was “hunak [thing] [location]”. For example, “There is a book in the building” would be “hunak kitab fil binayah/هناك كتاب في البنية”. The other, that I encountered more recently, is just “[location] [thing]”, rendering the same phrase as “fil binayah kitab/في البنية كتاب”. Is there any significant semantic difference between these two, or situations that would favor using one over the other? Primal Groudon (talk) 15:38, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Trying to interpret the words literally from Wiktionary, it seems that “hunak kitab fil binayah/هناك كتاب في البنية” means "over there, a book is in the building" and “fil binayah kitab/في البنية كتاب” means just "a book is in the building", although my Arabic is so poor I might have misunderstood something. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 17:05, 8 August 2024 (UTC)

Primal_Groudon -- In those contexts, kitab fi 'l-binayah is a noun phrase with a modifying prepositional phrase inside it: [_NP kitab [_PP fi 'l-binayah]], while Fi 'l-binayah kitab is a nominal sentence (i.e. without an explicit copular verb), with kitab as the subject and Fi 'l-binayah as the predicate... AnonMoos (talk) 17:51, 8 August 2024 (UTC)