Although the Semitic languages do differ from one another--just as French and Spanish do--they share one characteristic that facilitated transition from one to another. This is a reliance on verbs made up of three consonants (the "tri-consonantal root," as it is sometimes called) as the basic building blocks from which other elements of the language are derived, following a surprisingly regular (or at least it may seem so to Indo-European language speakers) set of word patterns. In Arabic, for example, the three consonants *sh-11r-b convey a basic idea equivalent to the English word "drink." From this "root" has been derived a simple verb "sharaba," meaning "he drank." The simple verb (generally called "Form I" or "Measure I") can then be altered in various ways to extend and refine the verbal idea in different directions. For instance, one can pronounce emphatically ("double") the second consonant of the root to convey the idea of making someone or something else do the action referred to by the Form I verb. In a smaller number of cases, such a "Form II" verb can have an intensive meaning. With "sharaba," when the "r" is doubled, both meanings can be found. "Sharraba" therefore can mean either "he made (him/it) drink," "he watered (it)," or "he drenched (it)," "he soaked it" (i.e., "he watered it intensively"). On the other hand, lengthening the vowel following the first consonant ("shaaraba," generally transliterated as "sharaba," with a macron indicating the lengthened vowel) often conveys the idea of doing the Form I action with someone or something else, or doing the action over a period of time. Thus "sharaba" means "to have a drink with (someone)," "to drink in (someone’s) company." If one prefixes an additional consonant "t" to the Form II verb, the meaning generally becomes passive or reflexive. In the case of "tasharraba," the usual meaning is a reflexive of the intensive meaning of the Form II: "he/it got drenched/soaked," "he/it soaked (s.th.) up." Originally, Arabic had fifteenth such derivational patterns, but only ten are in common use today and one of those, Form IX, is used only in very limited circumstances, because it can be applied only to verbs expressing colors ("he/it turned red") or defects ("he/it was one-eyed").
There are similar patterns used to form nouns, adjectives and even (sometimes) prepositions and other parts of speech. For example to prefix the syllable "ma" to a root, make the first consonant vowelless, and then follow the second consonant with the vowel "a" results in a noun that refers to either the place (most common) or the time when the verbal action occurs. In the case of the root *sh-r-b, for example, "mashrab" means most generally "place for drinking," which can be used to refer more specifically to such varied objects as a watering hole, a drinking trough, a fountain or a restaurant bar.
Another such "noun pattern" is the active participle pattern (‘ism fa‘il) where the first vowel of the root is a lengthened "a" placed immediately after the initial consonant and a second vowel, "i" is inserted between the second and third root letters. One of the most common uses of these nouns is to designate the person or thing that performs the action of the Form I verb. From *sh-r-b, then, one can derive the noun "sharib." One of the meanings of "sharib" is "drinker." English, somewhat similarly, uses the suffix *-er to indicate the doer of a verbal action. But English is much less regular in the way it uses such suffixes and prefixes than Arabic. "Drink-er" may illustrate our general rule perfectly, but "actor" and "flier" show that sometimes irregular vowel changes occur when these words are derived. Similarly, the nouns "pilot" and "workman" show that we can use entirely different forms to designate the doer of the action.
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