kana : perfect, present, or future ?
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Allaha kana sameeAAan baseeran () God is Hearer, Seer.
Allaha kana AAala kulli shay-in haseeban () God is the reckoner of all things.
Allaha kana ghafooran raheeman () God is Forgiver, Most Merciful.However, kana is in the perfect tense!
http//www.multimediaquran.com/quran/arabic/grammar/weak1.htmlAnd...
The action is completed in the perfect tense. You may also call this as the past tense because the action is completed before the present so it belongs to the past. For example, one may say, "I ate". The action of eating was finished in the past. The past could be a few minutes or a few decades before the present time.
http//www.multimediaquran.com/quran/arabic/grammar/tenses.htmlSo, how can kana be translated by ?is ? (present tense) in the above verses, whereas it seems that it has a panchronic (present, past and future at the same time) usage ?
Has someone got the following article ?
http//jss.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/27/1/57.pdf#search=%22panchronic%20%20arabic%22 -
Peace JM,
Has someone got the following article ?
http//jss.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/27/1/57.pdf#search=%22panchronic%20%20arabic%22I can only get the Journal of Semitic Studies from 1996 onwards. This particular article is from 1982.
I think that translators translate "kana" as "is" as opposed to "was" because of passages such as these
494 The God is expert with what you are doing
The problem is obviously lack of tense agreement if you translate "kana" as "was" while "are doing" is in the present tense. Thus translators have used "is" to maintain tense agreement. 494 is an obvious example of lack of tense agreement while the examples that you brought are less obvious because the tense disagreement is with what is in the mind of the translators. They reason that The God continues to be merciful and thus use "is".
Here is another example of tense disagreement
- They fear a day whose badness is wide-spread
We can see here that "kana" is not really for the past tense since it actually relates to a future event. Perhaps it is used here as a device for indicating that this will surely happen in the future. It will happen for certain as if the event has already passed.
Notice also the tense disagreement in 359. In this case we have the reverse of the cases that you mentioned. In this case "yakun" is in the present when it should be in the past "kan"
- The example of Jesus with God is similar to that of Adam; He created him from dust, then He said to him ?Be? and he was.
The verbs "created" and "said" are in the past tense so according to Classical Arabic grammar rules, "yakoon" (is) should have been "kan" (was). So the translators corrected what they perceived as a grammar problem and used "was" in the translation.
Your interesting observation relates to the fact that Clasical Arabic grammar rules do not reflect the nature of the actual Arabic language of the great reading.
Peace,
Ayman
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Peace Ayman, and thanks a lot for your response.
Is it true for only for the verb kana, or does it apply to other verbs too ?
Peace
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Peace JM,
- They fear a day whose badness is wide-spread
We can see here that "kana" is not really for the past tense since it actually relates to a future event. Perhaps it is used here as a device for indicating that this will surely happen in the future. It will happen for certain as if the event has already passed.
Peace Ayman
For Allah is it going to be an unseen future event or is this part of the ?unseen? that He is already ?seen? making it an event which has already gone by. Does Allah have to be limited
by past , present and the future. It is not a problem of ?that Clasical Arabic grammar rules do not reflect the nature of the actual Arabic language of the great reading.? It is a problem of our understanding of the nature of God.