Arabic-L:LING:Ongoing Discussions/gender

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Mon 12 Mar 2001
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1) Subject: Ongoing Discussions/gender

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1)
Date: 12 Mar 2001
From: mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: Ongoing Discussions/gender

>I know there is an exception or two but you still have not been able to come
up with any of >those. With respect to body parts, ma9id-ah "stomach" is fine
(to be treated as feminine). It is >singular yet it ends with the feminine
suffix {-ah}. Hence, also the example I gave in an earlier >posting: surr-ah
"navel." Note also the word baTn "abdomen" is masculine and singular and
>therefore fits nicely with the same pattern.

First of all, I am glad that you acknowledged the couple of examples that can
be viewed as exceptions to that ‘rule’, namely (monkhaar) ‘nostril’ and
(ma3ida) ‘stomach’). However, there is a few such exceptions, and here are
just some.
Singular body parts that have feminine gender marking: (raqabah) = ‘neck’,
(Hanjarah) = ‘larynx’, (sewwah) = ‘belly’, (jabhah) = ‘forehead’, and (luhaah)
= ‘uvula’. There are others as well.
Paired body parts that are masculine: (fakhdh) = thigh, (redf) = buttock,
(koo3) = ‘elbow’, (saa3ed) = upper arm, (khad) = ‘cheek’, (nahd) = ‘breast’,
(mebyaD) = ovary, (ka3b) = ‘heel’, (jifn) = ‘eyelid’, and (Haleb) = urinary
track, among others.


>First, if you recall very well the earliest thread of the discussion, certain
words ka?s,?arD, >samaa?, Haamil, Haa?iD, naahid, etc.) were mentioned. I
suggested that they can be collapsed >together under one class of nouns that
can be referred a la Whorfian terminology as "crypto-
>feminine." This is not to say that you cannot find some of them to be easily
explainable, e.g., >Haamil, Haa?iD, and naahid).

Now, I really do not understand why Haamil, Haa?iD, naashiz, 3aaqir and naahid
and masculine, and I would appreciate it if you explained that to me. What I
think is that these adjectives (not nouns) are assigned masculine gender for
some reason, and that is (the way I see it) is because they trigger very
specific presuppositions (female-specific adjectives). That is why if you said
“rajul 3aqir”, the sentence is anomalous because the existential
presupposition and that of the predicate are contradictory.  That means the
gender here is semantic/pragmatic because it deals with presuppositions,
implicatures, and truth values. The same applies for 3allamah, etc., the use
of which (rather than the form) presupposes uniqueness. That is why they do
not have dual or plural forms.

What I do not see a motivation for is collapsing the two categories. They are
clearly different because naashiz, and naahid describe human females, and ka?s
and ?arD do not. The first class has specific truth functional
presuppositions; the other does not

>The way I understand gender in Arabic is that there are three distinct types
>of gender marking: semantic gender, syntactic gender, and pragmatic gender.


>>”Bravo! You excluded, among other things, what Chomsky was not able to
exclude after so >>many years--morphology.”

Thanks for the comment, but apparently we are talking about two different
things. I am talking about the motivation for assigning gender. I have
described semantic, syntactic and pragmatic motivations, and I do not know of
any morphological or phonological ones. I would be happy if you could open my
eyes to these.

>To reach a good understanding of the Arabic language and certain other
languages, one needs >to understand the nature of derivation on the
lexeme(word) level. Due to the principle of >economy, noun stems in Arabic
have (zero) masculine marking (by default). Other languages >may have
different default forms. To mark nouns for the gender feminine (singular), for
>example, the feminine suffix is affixed to the stem. (There are however
certain nouns as >mentioned before (samaa? "sky," ?arD "earth," ka?s "glass")
that are feminine by default.)
>However, with respect to the Arabic language, gender derivation does not
proceed in this >fashion only.

I still have not seen your account of why there should be a default gender
assignment at all. Also, I do not know why samaa? is feminine but wafaa?,
galaa?, and walaa? are masculine. Finally, I do not know why lubnaan is
masculine whereas 3umaan is feminine.

Mustafa A. Mughazy
Graduate student
Depatment of Linguistics
University of Illinois
Urbana Champaign

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End of Arabic-L: 12 Mar 2001