Questions & Answers about كان رئيس قسم المبيعات مشغولا جدا.
How does the complex Idafa work here for "the head of the sales department"?
It is a chain of three nouns: رئيس (head), قسم (department), and المبيعات (sales). In a complex Idafa, only the very last noun in the chain can take the definite article الـ. The middle noun (قسم) is "squeezed" in the middle: it cannot take الـ, even though we understand it as "the sales department" in English.
If I were reading this out loud, what vowel endings (cases) would the three nouns in the Idafa chain take?
The first word رئيس is the subject of the sentence, so it gets a Damma (u). All the following nouns in an Idafa chain are always in the genitive case, meaning they both take a Kasra (i). So the chain is pronounced "ra'īsu qismi l-mabī'āti".
Why does مشغولا (busy) end with an Alif?
This is because of the verb كان (was). In Arabic, when you use كان, the predicate (the word describing the subject) must change to the accusative case. Since the word for busy is indefinite here, it takes the "-an" ending (Fatha tanween), which requires us to add an extra Alif to the end of مشغول.
Is المبيعات a plural word? What is its singular form?
Yes, المبيعات means "sales" and it is a regular feminine plural, which you can tell by the ـات ending. The singular form is مبيع (mabī'), which means "a sale".