Saying no: negation in Arabic
Arabic · Key Stage 3 · The School
Negating the present
The present tense is negated with la placed before the verb: yaktubu he writes becomes la yaktubu he does not write. Nothing about the verb itself changes. This is the most common negation a reader meets and the easiest, which makes it the right one to learn first.
Negating the past
The past has two routes. The simplest is ma before the past-tense verb: ma kataba he did not write. The other uses lam with the present-tense form to give a past meaning: lam yaktub also means he did not write. Both are correct and both are common, so a reader has to recognise the second even if they only produce the first.
Negating a verbless sentence
The nominal sentence — al-kitabu jadid, the book is new — has no verb to negate. Arabic uses laysa instead: laysa al-kitabu jadidan, the book is not new. Laysa behaves like a verb even though the sentence had none, and it changes the ending of what follows, which is the detail most often missed.
PRESENT: يَكْتُبُ he writes → لا يَكْتُبُ he does not write. PAST: كَتَبَ he wrote → ما كَتَبَ, or لَمْ يَكْتُبْ — and note that لَمْ takes the PRESENT form to mean the past. NOMINAL: الطالِبُ مُجْتَهِدٌ → لَيْسَ الطالِبُ مُجْتَهِداً, and لَيْسَ changes the ending of the khabar to a fatḥa. Identify the sentence type first, then choose the negator.