Arabic-L:LING:Ongoing Discussions

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Thu 01 Mar 2001
Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <dilworth_parkinson at byu.edu>
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-------------------------Directory-------------------------------------

1) Subject: Stop Words
1) Subject: gender
1) Subject: gender

-------------------------Messages--------------------------------------
1)
Date: 01 Mar 2001
From: "Schub, Michael" <michael.schub at trincoll.edu>
Subject: Stop Words

   (1)  I wonder if morphemes such as  / HaDrat- / in forms such as
/ HaDratu-ka/ki/kum /  should be considered "stop-morphemes."
     (2)  In the expresssions  /wajhu  l-la:hi / [Q55.27] and
/ maqa:ma  rabbi-hi / [Q55.46], the first word in each is considered
[at least in these particular occurrences] to be a stop-word
/ muqHam / by [the big-time anti-anthropomorphist] al-Zamakhshari.
                               Mike Schub

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2)
Date: 01 Mar 2001
From: alhawar at american.edu
Subject: gender

>1)Makes perfect sense to me:  elephants have HUMONGOUS ears.
>2)Also:  in the  9a:rabiyyah,  the plural of 'udh(u)n  is
> 'a:dha:nun["ears"].  Your dialect is something else.  {dual for
>plural}

In the same way that dual (masculine and feminine) and plural
feminine are usually simplified by being collapsed with plural
masculine--across verbal and nominal inflectional paradigms.

Mohammad T. Alhawary

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3)
Date: 01 Mar 2001
From: mughazy <mughazy at students.uiuc.edu>
Subject: gender

I would like to thank all those who posted comments on the issue of gender in
Arabic. I would also like to note that maybe many body parts that are in pairs
have feminine nouns, and many that are single are referred to with masculine
nouns. However, that observation does not account for everything. For example,
(me3dah) ‘stomach’, which is singular yet feminine, and there is (monkhaar)
‘nostril’, which is a member of a pair yet masculine. I think that any attempt
to account for gender in Arabic is simply too ambitious.

The way I understand gender in Arabic is that there are three distinct types
of gender marking: semantic gender, syntactic gender, and pragmatic gender.
Gender marking of natural kind terms distinguishes THINGS (not words) as
either females or males. What lays eggs or gives birth is a female and their
counterparts are males. This is semantic gender (e.g., dajaaja ‘chicken F’ and
‘deek’ rooster M’). Otherwise things do not have gender, i.e., “Sakhrah”
(rock) does not have gender semantically. Is a non-natural kind entity such as
a VCR (vedyo) masculine, but an injection (Ho?na) is feminine? Of course not,
they do not even have gender to be signaled, it is the WORD that has gender
marking rather than the denotation.

Words such as ‘table’ and ‘chair’ have no motivation to be distinguished as
masculine or feminine. However, it is necessary to assign some gender to them
so as to inflect verbs. How can you inflect a verb if you do not know the
gender of the subject? Here gender is not assigned according to any cognitive
or semantic principle. It is ad hoc.

  Pragmatic gender is what discussed earlier on the list as ‘cross addressing’,
where a feminine word would be used to refer to a man or a boy, while a
masculine form would be used to address a woman or a girl. It is restricted to
contexts where the speaker is expressing intimacy or endearment.

Semantic gender is the Syntactic gender is , which the old Arab linguists
referred to as ‘al-mo?annath al-majazee’ as is needed

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End of Arabic-L: 01 Mar 2001