LessonsPractice 7: Ellipsis, Preposing and Contextual Meaning in Qur’anic ExpressionQuiz

فَصَبْرٌ جَمِيلٌ
So [the course is] beautiful patience.

Yūsuf 12:18 gives the compressed expression fa-ṣabrun jamīl. Grammarians may explain its underlying predication through more than one possible reconstruction, but those supplied words are not visibly in the verse. The contextual point is recourse to noble patience.

An English rendering such as “I will exercise beautiful patience” may express the intended sense, yet it is a translation choice rather than a verbatim inventory of Arabic tokens. Distinguish the written form, possible syntactic estimates and interpretive translation.

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Fa-ṣabrun jamīl: limits of reconstruction

Practice 7: Ellipsis, Preposing and Contextual Meaning in Qur’anic Expression

فَصَبْرٌ جَمِيلٌ
So [the course is] beautiful patience.

Yūsuf 12:18 gives the compressed expression fa-ṣabrun jamīl. Grammarians may explain its underlying predication through more than one possible reconstruction, but those supplied words are not visibly in the verse. The contextual point is recourse to noble patience.

An English rendering such as “I will exercise beautiful patience” may express the intended sense, yet it is a translation choice rather than a verbatim inventory of Arabic tokens. Distinguish the written form, possible syntactic estimates and interpretive translation.