The active participle in Egyptian Arabic

• Introduction
• Derivation of the active participle
• List of commonly-used active participles
• Examples of usage

Introduction

Active participles act as adjectives, and so they must agree with their subject. An active participle can be used in several ways: (1) to describe a state of being (understanding; knowing), (2) to describe what someone is doing right now (going, leaving), and (3) to indicate that someone/something is in a state of having done something (having put something somewhere, having lived somewhere for a period of time).

For some verbs, active participles are not used, while for others, they are used frequently and must be used instead of the present continuous tense if you want to describe a current action. If you mess up and use an imperfect-tense verb where you should use an active participle (or vice versa), it can change your sentence's meaning completely!

Derivation of the active participle

Active participles are derived in fairly regular ways from their root verbs.

* Note: When the imperfect howwa conjugation of the verb in question ends in -a, as with "istanna - yistanna," the ending -a is replaced by -i in the active participle, as with "mistanni."

List of commonly-used active participles

Generally speaking, the most commonly-used active participles fall into the categories of motion or action (going, coming, leaving, carrying), location (living, staying), and mental state (seeing, understanding, wanting). Here is a table of some of these active participles:

Examples of usage

Here are some examples of situations in which you could use the active participle. Note that generally you can leave out the subject pronoun that would go with the active participle, as long as it's clear who you're talking about.

Note: It's common to use لسة (lissa), "still," before an active participle to mean that an action has just been completed. You can think of it as saying, "I'm still in the state of just having (done whatever)."