Grammatical Breakdown of ''The old man entered into the new city and said to the people "where is the boy?" they said "the boy went to makkah yesterday.''''

Assalamu alikum

Please can you transalte, vowelize and gramatically breakdown the following:

The old man entered into the new city and said to the people "where is the boy?" they said "the boy went to makkah yesterday."

jazakallah.

thank you for swift response. it has been of great help. i have a question:

الوَلَدُ مبتدأ مرفوعٌ بالضمة


if there is a mubtadah, should there not be a khabar or a something to talk of its absence?

Hmmm I would have thought الوَلَدُ was the khabar and أينَ
was the mubtada..does أينَ act in the same manner as a demonstrative pronoun in this nominal sentence? I am also slightly unsure...

Assalamualaikum wa Rahmatullah,

Looking at the part of the text "Where is the boy?" From my own understanding I wouldn't say الوَلَدُ is mubtada as the question is not a nominal sentence here.

Let me explain myself, a nominal sentence as we know it is a sentence which gives an information about a subject. As the Ustadh mentioned in the previous classes it generally falls into 'The X is Y' formula. If the sentence became a question, we are still in the frame of a nominal sentence as some form of information is portrayed so for example 'Is the X Y? or 'Is this a X?' in the former case X is mubtada and Y is the khaba, in the latter case 'this' (which is the demonstrative pronoun) is mubtada and X is Khabar.

However the question being asked here is "Where is the boy?" and not for instance 'Is the boy in the House?' therefore in my opinion the question is outside of the category of a nominal sentence. The answer however can be a nominal sentence if the reply was to be 'The boy is in the House,' however in this case it is a verbal sentence.

I hope that helps in answering your question but if I am incorrect in my understanding then I also await the correct answer.

Wasalaam

السلام عليكم

Honestly - Haqqan I have no idea, however I have attempted to put my thoughts down:

Firstly, I agree with Nurjahan in that ‘The X is Y’ formula [which is in the form of a statement] cannot apply to the grammatical breakdown of the question ‘Where [is] the boy?’ even though the الولدُ appears to be in the nominative case, signified by the _ُ atop it.

It is clear however, that the word أينَ is indicating a response to a place (the answer will include a preposition) and must therefore be a function word. I would not say that it is حرفُ الإستفهام only, as there must be another word other than حرفُ to describe the function of the word. In terms of vowelisation believe the word is fixed on fatHa.

For the word الولدُ I would consider it to be the اسمُ الإستفهام .I guess I'm following some sort of pattern like اسم مجرور after a حرف جرٍ. Other than this,

I really look forward to the answer إن ساء الله


مع السلاةم

*Please excuse the small lettering, the keyboard is being problematic.

السلام عليكم


Ok, so my first post was an absolute disaster - reading back on it now I think I can't even understand it myself - let alone anyone else. So - believe it or not - I'm taking the mathematical approach. I'm going to try my hand at 'reasoning'...

So lets start with the nominal sentence: The X is Y

If I try to fit the question into the X is Y, this will NOT work as the former is a statement, however, I may be able to use some of the aspects from that formula and I come up with: Where is the X?

So according to me, I see a link between both X's above, which means that I am now 'cancelling' each one out with the other. This means that both are the مبتدأ

Next, we go on to the 'Where?' and in order to work this out - don't laugh, I actually thought about this - I figured that I'd first have to look at the answer that it would give, in order to find out what the function of the word actually is.

In this case the asking of 'Where' will lead me to a place, this place will be the news or information of the sentence, i.e. خبرٌ

So for example: If I ask أين الولد؟, My answer could be الولد موجود في البيت

Leaving me with an interesting conclusion:

If the question 'Where is the boy' is converted into the X and Y formula, it would only work BACKWARDS!

Yes - at this stage I know you think I've lost the plot but seriously, I think:

Where = will give rise to the خبرٌ (The predicate)
the boy (THE X) = مبتدأ (The subject)

So I guess what I'm trying to say is that the sentence grammatically could be: حرف الإستفهام) خبرٌ ومبتدأ) (Predicate first!)

I really pray we get the answer soon - I'm running out of ideas...


مع السلامة