Sarf — Morphology

اسْم الفَاعِل

ism al-fāʿil

The active participle


The noun derived from the verb to name the one who does the act: kātib, the one writing.

اسْمُ الفَاعِلِism al-fāʿilActive participle
A derived descriptive noun signifying the one from whom the act proceeds, with the sense of occurrence rather than of a fixed quality.

From the triliteral verb it is built on the pattern fāʿil: kataba → kātib, ʿalima → ʿālim, ḥakama → ḥākim. From the augmented verb it is built by putting a mīm with a kasra before the last root letter, on the pattern of the present tense: yukrimu → mukrim, yastaghfiru → mustaghfir.

هٰذَا كَاتِبٌ دَرْسَهُ

“This is one writing his lesson.” Note that kātib here governs an object in naṣb, exactly as its verb would: the participle inherits the work of the verb it came from.

Sources

  • شذا العرف في فنّ الصرفShadhā al-ʿArf fī Fann al-ṢarfAḥmad al-Ḥamlāwī (d. 1932 CE)

    The standard modern primer of Ṣarf; the patterns and their names below follow its arrangement.

  • ألفية ابن مالكAlfiyyat Ibn MālikIbn Mālik (d. 672 AH)

In the glossary

Related entries

ṣarfالمَصْدَرThe verbal noun

The noun that names the event itself, stripped of any time — the source the verb is derived from.

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ṣarfالمِيزان الصَّرْفيThe morphological scale

Weighing a word against fāʾ–ʿayn–lām, so that its root letters and its added letters can be told apart at a glance.

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naḥwالفَاعِلThe doer (grammatical subject of a verb)

The noun in the nominative whose verb is mentioned before it.

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PatternsThe nounThe verb