لَيْتَنِيI wish I

Example sentences

• لَيْتَنِي فِيهَا جَذْعًا،

  I wish I were a stump in it,

  لَيْتَنِي — I wish I were. A wishing particle for the impossible-or-unlikely, 'if only', with -ni ('me') fused onto its end as its subject. Unusually for a particle it acts like a verb here: it grabs the speaker as its subject and the noun after it as a predicate, framing the whole as a sigh of longing.

  From: The Night of Revelation and Consolation →