抄録
In the Koran, some words of personal noun have two (or more) different plural forms, the sound plural and the broken plural. This phenomenon might be explained by assuming that the words of plural notion have one signification but they have different meanings each other (The term ‘meaning’ here is meant what the personal nouns imply, how they sound like, besides of their simple and dry ‘signification.’). The aim of this essay is to try to explain the difference of the meanings among the different plural forms of the personal nouns. The main points of the essay are as follows.
1. A comparative study of meanings between the sound plurals and the broken plurals leads us to induce that the broken plurals have extreme or emphatic meaning while the sound plurals have general or simple meaning. For instance, the word ‘jahilun’ (ignorants) implies the people who apt to act wrongly, while the word ‘juhhal’ means the men of foolish nature. Moreover, the word ‘alimun’ simply means the people who know, and the word “ulama” means the learned men, scholars.
2. The above mentioned extremity of meaning in Arabic personal nouns should be divided into two poles; the pole of superiority, and the pole of inferiority. The word “ulama” would be in superior pole because of the scholars' high intellectual level, while the word ‘juhhal’ would be in inferior pole because of the ignorants' low intellectual level.
3. There are nine broken plural patterns of Arabic personal nouns in all. They are, fu'al, fu'al, fa'alah, fu'alah, fu'ala', 'af'ila', fa'la, fa'l, fa'alilah.
4. In the Koran, some personal nouns have two or more broken plural forms. For instance, the word ‘kafir’ (disbeliever) has such broken plural forms as ‘kafarah’, ‘kuffar’, ‘kawafir’, ‘kufur’, etc. In such case, the extreme meaning of the word should be regarded as to have been diffused to each plural form.
Thus the meaning of Arabic personal nouns is to some extent combined with their plural forms and patterns.
