Arabic-L:LING:gender

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

----------------------------------------------------------------------
Arabic-L: Thu 22 Mar 2001
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
[To post messages to the list, send them to arabic-l at byu.edu]
[To unsubscribe, send message to listserv at byu.edu with first line reading:
           unsubscribe arabic-l                                      ]

-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject: gender
2) Subject: gender

-------------------------Messages--------------------------------------
1)
Date: 22 Mar 2001
From: "Schub, Michael" <michael.schub at trincoll.edu>
Subject: gender

  RE:  la-quTbiyyah  al-'andalusiyyah.

      amanecer, anochecer, etc. are calques (semantic borrowings) in

Spanish from Arabic.  Might not the Arabic AUGMENTATIVE / -atun /

as in  / 9allaamatun /,  / raawiyatun /,  / nassaabatun /, etc. be

be the historical source of such Spanish pairs as:

Masc:  jarro "little jar'  vs. Fem.   jarra  "big jar;"

         hoyo  "hole"                   hoya  "valley;"

         rayo  "spoke"                  raya  "stripe, streak."

or is this perhaps merely another instance of the natural superiority

of women, a la:  Die ewige Weiblichkeit zieht uns hinaaaaaaan??

                                            (Not from Down Under)

                                             Mike Schub

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
2)
Date: 22 Mar 2001
From: mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: gender

alhawar at american.edu wrote
“Again, singular body parts that end with a feminine gender marking are fine,
because they are treated as feminine any way. There is no need to treat them
otherwise.”

The way I understood your ‘rule’ is that singular body parts are masculine and
paired ones are feminine. If this is the case, how can single parts that are
inflected for feminine be fine? Then why the exception that you mentioned,
namely ‘surrah’ (naval) is not fine? Also, there is not a couple of
exceptions. If you look at fiqh al-lughah by al-tha3aliby you will find tens
of ‘exceptions’. I do not know how many exceptions it takes to refute the
existence of a rule.

“(ridf)= "buttock": synonimous with 9ajuz/kafal (lower part of body below the
back) seems to be a neoligism in the gloss you provided
(nahd)="breast": no such meaning in FuSHaa. The word for "breast" in FuSHaa is
"thadii": treated both as feminine and masculine (hence not problematic to the
identified pattern)
(mebyaD)= ovary: seems to be a neoligism"

I did not ask you earlier about what you think fuSHa is, and I think I should
now because you are considering all these words to be neologisms. In fact, if
your ‘rule’ is really a rule, it is expected to accommodate neologisms, if
they were. In your latest posting you gave the example of ‘naahid’ but now you
are telling me that ‘nahd’ is not fuSHa. Interestingly, I checked Al-tunair
(1987), and he claims that ‘nahd’, ‘thadii’ and ‘bez’ are all fuSHa words, and
they are all masculine (and these are paired). Also, earlier on you responded
to the case of ‘ma3idah’ (stomach) by providing a close synonym, namely,
‘baTn' that fits in your rule, and you did the same to other examples. I am
not concerned with synonyms, I am concerned with the forms that do not follow
that rule.

I would agree that the Arab grammarians did a great job describing patterns of
gender assignment. However, these are descriptive patterns, and they have
little, if any, explanatory power. In fact, I was waiting for you to tell me
why single body pairs are assigned masculine not feminine (why not feminine?)
Is it an arbitrary decision or a motivated one? Also, who made that decision?
Are we thinking of fuSHa as a pure language, or a variety of a language that
changes?

“You mean a sentence as in "haadhaa r-rajulu 9aaqir" ?
“Well, to start with, "rajul 9aaqir" is fine not anomalous although irregular,
the regular form being "rajul 9aqiir."”

Well, I am sorry but I have to disagree because that sentence is anomalous.
Actually if you accept that sentence, you will have to accept "haatha rajul
Hamil" (this is a pregnant man). I do not have the native speaker’s intuitions
about fuSHa, but I still think that it is a contradiction i.e., it is false
under all possible assignments of truth-values for its terms. Unfortunately
most emails do not support predicate logic notation. Otherwise, I would have
shown you the truth table for that sentence.

“Second, why invoke pragmatics if the phenomenon can be captured semantically
and/or syntactically in a straightforward fashion and without any ambiguity.
Your comment is not based on full understanding of the forms as they behave in
FuSHaa Arabic.”

Thanks again for your kind comments, but believe me Arabs knew about
pragmatics and they used pragmatic gender marking. Here is an example from
asraar al-3arabiyya (p. 228)
Omar ben-abi rabii3a said
“fakaana mejanna doona ma kuntu attaqi
thalaath shukhooSin ka3ibaani wa mu3Siri”

In the phrase ‘thalaath shukhooS’ (three-masculine   persons-masculine) the
gender of the quantifier is the same as that of the noun although it is
supposed to be feminine for the quantifier. Also, in the Koran “fa?aHyayyna
bihi baldatan mayyetan” where the adjective mayyetan (dead) is masculine and
the noun baldatan (town) is feminine. These are typical cases of transfer of
meaning, which is a pure pragmatic phenomenon discussed in several papers by
Geoffrey Nunberg. You can figure out the conversational implicatures invoked
by gender marking.

Haa?iD etc.
“These forms do appear with the feminine {-ah} suffix but with an additional
meaning. In fact, the appearance of the feminine suffix with such forms is
assumed to be obligatory (by Al-Khalil Ibn Ahmad as cited by Sibaawayhi) in
eventive/temporal contexts, expressed paraphrastically (given that in the
first place they are assumed to be feminine attributes exclusively): e.g.,
hiya Haa?iD-ah ghadan. "She is menstruating tomorrow." This makes such forms
on a par with other regular adjectives. Consider hiya jaa?i9-ah "she is
hungry(now)" or kaanat jaa?i9-ah "she was hungry" where hunger is an attribute
that is not inherent or constantly present in females only but is a rather
temporal state.”

Thank you for the example, which shows that sometimes gender is assigned for
semantic reasons (that is part of my argument). I am not sure if hunger is not
inherent or menstruating is constant (I hope not), but your attempt does not
explain how gender assignment is syntactic or even semantic. That is what I
tried to explain in terms of presupposition, which is empirical rather than
speculative.

I said “ 3allamah, etc., the use of which (rather than the form)
>presupposes uniqueness. That is why they do >not have dual or plural
>forms.”

You said “Are you making up rules for Arabic or citing some source/s?. Here
are some plural forms: Haamilaat, HaaDatin, 9uqur, nawaahid, kawaa9ib, etc. “

Apparently you did not read what I said closely. I was talking about the
subset of words that have indefeasible conventional implicatures, logical
entailments and presuppositions such as 3allaamah that do not have dual or
plural forms because of these presuppositions. Also, again you are using
nawaahid although you claim nahd is not fuSHa.

Once again I acknowledge the great job the Arab grammarians did describing
gender assignment and disagreement. However, I think linguists should try to
account for these patterns (not rules), although it is a formidable task,
rather than simply view these descriptions as self motivated rules. Also, I
still think that there are semantic and pragmatic motivations for gender
assignment and disagreement in Arabic. I believe that semantics and pragmatics
are not things that we 'invoke' when we have nothing to say. That is my story
and I am sticking to it till I see good research grounded in formal semantics
and pragmatic theory that proves otherwise.

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

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
End of Arabic-L: 22 Mar 2001