Verbs: Physical, Mental and "Spiritual"

The 3 Orders of Verbs

If you’ve studied Arabic long enough, you’d have asked or wondered:

Why does the main form of a past tense have the pattern فَعَلَ at times, فَعِلَ at others, and occasionally فَعُلَ ?

Wonder no more. This randomness may not be that random after all.¹

Let’s unpack it by taking 30 examples of the most frequent verbs in the Quran for each pattern:

Notice that the rows are based on the vowel on the second root letter.

Now, spot the differences between the 3 verb orders by breezing through their meanings.

For the third order of فَعُلَ verbs (in “blue”), it would be somewhat obvious, don’t you think? The meanings either start with ‘be’ or ‘become’. Followed by words like good, bad, great, heavy and so on. Well, in English, we call these words adjectives. But in Arabic, they can also be “verbed”. Weird I know, but that’s not the topic for today.

Let’s move on to the first two. From the meanings of verbs, take some time to see how different the first order is from the second.

Did you notice that the first seems to be about “hard actions” in contrast to “soft actions” of the second order? Well, not entirely, but in general they seem to be.

Now, compare the second and third. How similar are they?

See it yet? Go through both again before reading on.

Can you see that both (Orders 1 and 2) are more about “state” rather than “action” (Order 1)?

The second order is categorised by scholars as ‘transitory state’ while the third as ‘permanent state’, noting that these categorisations are general, and not necessarily universal.²

To make things simpler, I would like to introduce another term for the third order: identity.

Therefore,

O1 is about Action such as go, make and gather.

O2 is about State such as know, think, fear.

O3 is about Identity such as be vast, be stern and be great.

Here’s a fun fact: in the Quran, there are around 500 action verbs, 100 state verbs, and 10 identity verbs.

Can you see that the action-state-identity framework bears semblance to the body-mind-spirit, or physical-mental-spiritual framework?³

So what can we deduce out of all this?

Perhaps nothing, or maybe many things.

But what is absolutely interesting is that the so-called a-i-u pattern randomness may not be that random after all.

1. Here’s a short video of this article.

2. https://arabic-for-nerds.com/vowel-second-root-letter/

3. By spirituality I mean what you are (beingness), mentality is what you think/feel (state), and physicality is what you do (doingness).