A friend saw the a car with this sticker in the back window. The text was surrounded by cross stickers so she assumed it was some Arabic-speaking Christian church
I think I’ve pieced together that the last two words are “light of the world” and I see that “I am the light of the world” and “You are the light of the world” are phrases from the Gospels. But when I try translating those the Arabic I get back doesn’t match the first word.
The Arabic OCR tools I’ve found online don’t get a clean result either.
The word in the sticker is al-Masīḥ which literally translates as Messiah and is also used as a name for Jesus, similar to how we use Christ as a name for Jesus in English, so Colophon’s translation is probably a better rendering of how this would be expressed in English.
In Arabic, the verb “to be” is usually implied and not explicitly used, so the translation could also be “Christ is the light of the world.”
No…
I don’t know the correct grammar names, so it’s hard for me to explain… but when you have a construction that says the “x” of the “x”, then you do not need the definite article -al on the first word. So CookingWithGas is correct.
I don’t think the second one would be wrong, it just isn’t the way it’s usually done. My knowledge of Arabic is very limited and I freely defer to anyone here who really knows.
no.
نور
is a light (if alone) or “light”
النور
is “the light”
there is not a verb in it.
the verb “is” is implied in the structure. You can write it with the actual verb to be, but then it sounds strange, an error of the non-native speaker.
Maybe it’s just blurred, but I’m not seeing the “m” in the first word. That is, I’m not seeing anything between the “Al” and the “s” (reading right to left, of course).
I recall, from some Hebrew language textbooks I saw, this was called “smichut” (סמיכות) or “construct state”. According to this wiki, it is a construction common to all the Semitic languages.
In Hebrew at least, it is used when one noun functions as an adjective to modify another noun, and this is commonly done to create possessive cases. We do something similar quite regularly in English, with phrases such as “library book”.
