Arabic-L:LING:Ongoing Discussions

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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Arabic-L: Tue 06 Mar 2001
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1) Subject: fem words
2) Subject: fem words

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1)
Date: 06 Mar 2001
From: alhawar at american.edu
Subject: fem words

  >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 know there is an exception or two but you still have not been able
to come up with any of those.  Recall, the early thread of the
discussion was how to account for nouns that do not end with the
feminine suffix but are nevertheless treated as feminine.  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.

Now munkhaar/minkhaar "nostril" is not a fuSHaa word.  In my
(Damascene) dialect, only the plural manakhiir is used for "nostrils"
while minkhaar (singular) is used interchangeably with ?anf for
"nose."  The closest related form in FuSHaa that relates to
nose/nostrils is a verb: tamakhkhara r-riiH "inhaled the wind" or
"turned away from the "wind."  Needeless to say, you are confusing
(1) between fuSHaa and colloquial and (2) between the uses of
minkhaar vs manaakhiir (at least in my dialect).  



>I think that any attempt to account for gender in Arabic is simply
>too ambitious.

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).
 Second, Arab grammarians went into great length disussing gender
throughout their treatises and there is even a great number of books
that carry the title: "The Masculine and Feminine."  When you read
such works, you will understand a great deal not only about gender in
Arabic, but also about the Arabic language in general.

>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.  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.  For example, consider the treatment of
names of countries, which you may think that their gender distinction
is arbitrary; (i.e., some of them treated as masculine and some of
them as feminine.)  Well, not so.  The pattern/rule is that names of
countries are treated as feminine, except when they are derived from
(1) ...... and (2) end with .......... . I leave it for you to check
for yourself.    


>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.



Neither Mike Schub nor I have been confusing between form and
referent as your comment seems to suggest.  The discussion has been
on a less technical (linguistic) level.



>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.

No argument can be more cyclic than this.  First, note the apt term
"crypto-feminine" as coined by Whorf.  This is not to say that
initially the distiction had an intuitive rationale/motivation which
got blurred later due to diachronic change or other factors, which I
am not going into here.  Secondly, what you are saying is that the
lexical annotation derives from the syntactic derivation which is
derived from the lexical annotations.  Feature checking (within
minimalist framework) carried out whether before Spell out or after
Spell out (at LF) depends on both form (rich vs impoverished
morphology)and the (arbitrary or non-arbitrary) annotations of the
lexical form.



>Semantic gender is the Syntactic gender is, which the old Arab
>linguists referred to as >'al-mo?annath al-majazaa' as is needed.

In addition to cyclicity and factual misrepresentation of what Arab
grammarians argued for with respect to gender and derivation, you
would have nothing to explain (based on your comments and
conclusions)the distinction of 9aalim and 9allaam-ah "scholar"
discussed in an earlier discussion, where the feminine suffix has
nothing to do with endearment, nor gender (natural vs unnatural), nor
syntax.  

The trap that anyone may fall into, including myself, is when we come
up with conclusions about fuSHaa based on our intuitive knowledge of
a colloquial each of which has its own pattern/rule-govern system
though there are many points of convergence betwen the two.  

Mohammad T. Alhawary

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2)
Date: 06 Mar 2001
From: alhawar at american.edu
Subject: fem words

I stand corrected.  A little after I sent my posting, I found a direct
reference to minkhar (not monkhaar)"nostril" minkharaan "two nostrils" in
fuSHaa
in _sharH al-taSriih 9alaa al-tawDiiH_.
Mohammad T. Alhawary

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End of Arabic-L: 06 Mar 2001