My vocabulary questions keep refusing to remain vocabulary questions.
Near the beginning of Baqarah, yunfiqoon, spending, led me to the root letters ن ف ق. I checked the Quranic Arabic Corpus and found the same root associated with nifaq, hypocrisy. Spending and hypocrisy? They sounded so far apart. I wanted to know how the words belonged to the same family. Quranic Arabic Corpus: ن ف ق
A story about the connection would be memorable. But where did that story come from? Which book explained it? Could I see the entry myself, with its page and reference, rather than only receive a neat explanation?
My Arabic was not yet strong enough to read all those books unaided. That did not mean I wanted to be limited to the simplest dictionary. With help translating the passages, I wanted to compare what the different books actually said. The aim was not to collect more English equivalents. I wanted to understand why a word could mean what it meant.
The questions became very small and very specific. What is the ma doing in mimma and bima? Is it doing the same work in kama or innama? What changes between anzala and unzila? Why does muflihoon belong to the form I was learning as Form IV when it is a noun, not the verbal noun I expected from that pattern?
Sometimes the English grammar term was another obstacle. “Active participle” did not help until it was connected to the Arabic patterns I already knew. I needed the explanation to begin from there.
With ف ل ح, I was trying to connect meanings presented to me around splitting, cultivation and success. How did attaining or continuing in good belong with splitting and cleaving? With أ م ن, the question was how safety, security and trust connected with believing. I did not want each meaning left in a separate box.
But I also needed to distinguish the root from the particular form and the particular word in front of me. When I asked about “continuing in good”, was that an account of the root, or of muflihoon here? Those are not interchangeable questions.
The same concern followed me into whole phrases. Knowing the words separately was not enough. Who is acting? What is the subject? What belongs to what? I wanted those relationships visible alongside the vocabulary, because the next question could depend on a grammatical connection I had not yet understood.