Word
صديقي ذو لحية وشارب.
Meaning
My friend has a beard and a mustache.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of صديقي ذو لحية وشارب.
وwa
and
صديقsadîq
friend
يi
my / me (after a preposition)
ذوdhû
possessor of, with
Questions & Answers about صديقي ذو لحية وشارب.
Why do we use ذو here instead of the feminine form ذات even though لحية (beard) is a feminine word?
ذو (possessor of / having) agrees in gender with the person who has the characteristic, not the characteristic itself. Since the subject صديقي (my friend) is masculine, we use the masculine ذو. If we were talking about a female friend having a specific feature, we would use ذات.
Why is ذو spelled with a waw (و) here? Doesn't it sometimes appear as ذا or ذي?
Yes! ذو is one of the special 'Five Nouns' in Arabic that change their final letter to show their grammatical role. Here, it acts as the predicate (the core information) about the subject صديقي, so it must be in the nominative case. The nominative marker for these special nouns is the letter و.
What case do the words لحية (beard) and شارب (mustache) take after ذو?
They take the genitive case (مجرور). The word ذو always forms an Idafa (construct state) with the noun that follows it. Therefore, لحية gets a kasratayn (two bottom vowels) to become لحيةٍ, and شارب copies that case because it is connected by و (and).
Could I just say صديقي له لحية or صديقي عنده لحية?