Hi everyone!
A few posts ago we looked at how to conjugate the perfective. In this post, as promised there, we’re going to look very briefly at its semantics. For the most part, these are exactly the same as they are in fuS7a. Bit since how the perfective differs from the English past is often not very well explained to learners, in this post I’ll be trying to give you a sense of what exactly this means.
Meaning
The most basic use of the perfective is to talk about events in the past (thus its Arabic name, ماضي). In this sense it corresponds either to the present perfect or the past in English, depending on context:
شفت الفيلم
shift ilfilem
I’ve seen the film
I saw the film
رحتي ع ألمانيا؟
ri7ti 3a 2almaanya?
have you been to Germany?
did you go to Germany?
It’s very common for a verb of becoming (‘get bigger’, ‘get closer’, ‘get tired’ etc but also ‘come to like’, ‘fall in love with’, ‘come to realise’ etc) to be used in the perfective in a meaning that generally idiomatically translates as an English adjective. This is a straightforward extension of the present perfect meaning:
تعبت ولو
t3ibt wlo
I’m so worn out! [= I’ve got tired]
I got so tired!
حبيتو؟
7abbeeto?
do you like it? [= have you come to like it]
did you like it?
اي عرفتو
2ee 3rifto
right, I remember who he is! [= I have recognised him]
yeah, I recognised him
The perfective is not the English past tense
So far, so straightforward. But there are some important ways in which the perfective is not the same as its English equivalent. As I’ve talked about elsewhere on this blog, Arabic is more sensitive than English to the distinction between states and drawn out/repeated actions on the one hand and ‘snapshots’ of action on the other. In linguistics, these two categories are themselves known as ‘imperfective‘ and ‘perfective‘.
As the similar terminology might suggest, the former category of actions can’t generally be expressed with a perfective. Instead, for states and repeated past actions, we use an imperfective form combined with kaan, a structure we’ll look at in more detail next time. This is similar to the distinction between ‘imperfect’ and ‘past’ in Romance languages (French, Spanish and Italian for example):
PERFECTIVE |
STATE |
عرف |
كان يعرف kaan ya3ref he knew |
قدر 2ider he managed to do it |
كان يقدر |
ضحكني Da77akni he made me laugh [once] |
كان يضحكني |
It’s also worth noting here that although in isolation the perfective always refers to the past, it can sometimes have non-past meaning when combined with various particles:
ولو متت؟
w law mitet?
and if you died?
بركي رجع بكير؟
birki rije3 bakkiir?
what if he comes back early?
Although the perfective doesn’t have past meaning here, however, it’s still subject to the same constraint on states and repeated actions. We’ll see this in more detail when we talk about conditional structures.