Rafa, Nasab & Jarr¶

So far, we've been saying that nouns will have a fatha, dhamma or kasra on the last letter, depending on e.g. if it's a maf'ool or a مضاف اليه etc. The actual names for these are رفع, نصب and جرّ - these are the 3 different cases of nouns.

To explain this in more detail, let's pick as an example noun the word مُسْلِمٌ. This noun works as per this table:

Other nouns work in the same way e.g. مُعَلِّمٌ:

Feminine nouns work similarly, but slightly differently (just the plurals are different) e.g. مُسْلِمَةٌ:

Also, the above tables apply to regular plurals (and also show you how to make nouns be dual and plural). However, there's a bunch of plurals which are "broken plurals" - they don't follow the same rules. For example, let's look at how the word مَسْجِدٌ works:

TODO-check whether ٍ or ِ for plural

There isn't an exact rule for broken plurals, you basically just have to memorise them. Arabic Tutor Volume 1 Lesson 9 shows many examples of words that have broken plurals, and how some of them form broken plurals in similar forms; but you still just have to memorise them. That said, this table shows the rule that broken plurals behave like the singular form in how they work for رفع, نصب and جرّ.

Here's a table for remembering this a bit easier (using ب as a substitute letter in the last 2 rows).

TODO-other more complex ones in Arabic Tutor Vol 1