Active and Passive in Arabic

5년 전

  The passive (المبني للمجهول) form is important and interesting. It involves changing the form and the meaning of sentences to a certain extent. In passive constructions, the object of the active sentence becomes a grammatical subject, e.g. ‘my friend wrote the book’ is an active sentence that begins with the subject. Its passive counterpart ‘the book was written by my friend’ brings the object to the position of the subject and presents the real subject in the end of the sentence in a prepositional phrase. 
In Arabic, passive works in the same way. It should always be remembered that we can only form passive constructions from transitive verbs, i.e. verbs that take a direct object.
The passive and the active forms of most verbs in Arabic are closely related. The main difference between active and passive forms of verbs is the vowels.
The passive of past tense verbs is formed by putting a damma or short /o/ on the first letter of the verb, and a kasra or short /i/ on the letter before last. For example,
كَتَبَ = he wrote
كُتِبَ = it was written
كَتَبَ الولد الخطاب. “The boy wrote the letter.”
كُتِبَ الخطاب. “The letter was written.”
The passive of present tense verbs is formed by putting a damma or short /o/ on the first letter of the verb, and a fateha or short /a/ on the letter before last.
يَكتُبُ= he writes
يُكتَبُ = it is written
يَكتُبُ الولد الخطاب. “The boy writes the letter.”
يُكتَبُ الخطاب. “The letter is written.”
In English, it is not uncommon to express the agent of the passive action using a by-phrase. 
For example; this story was written by a famous author
In Arabic, the passive construction is used mostly without the by-phrase and the agent remains unknown. When we need to use the by-phrase in Arabic, we use the expression (من قبل) /min qibal/ to express ‘by’.
When the subject is known, we use active sentences to express it. For example, to translate the sentence “this book was written by a famous author”, we use the sentence (هذا الكتاب كتبه مؤلف مشهور.) We can also use the passive (هذا الكتاب كتب من قبل مؤلف مشهور). However, the use of the active sentence is more idiomatic in Arabic style.
One way of changing passive constructions into active in Arabic is to use the construction تم  + مصدر instead of the passive verb, e.g. “the company was founded in the eighties” can be translated into:
(أُنشئت الشركة في الثمانينيات) or (تم إنشاء الشركة في الثمانينيات)