Arabic-L:LING:Ongoing Discussions/gender

[Dilworth B. Parkinson]

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1) Subject: Ongoing Discussions/gender
2) Subject: Ongoing Discussions/gender

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1)
Date: 14 Mar 2001
From: "Schub, Michael" <michael.schub at trincoll.edu>
Subject: Ongoing Discussions/gender

  Maybe  Haamil,  Haa'iD etc. on the one hand, and 9allaamatun,
raawiyatun, etc. on the other hand are examples of "polarity"
like  / thalaathatu  rijaalin / through  / 9asharatu  rijaalin / on
the one hand, and  / thalaathu  niswatin /  [a  'jam9  qillah !!]
through  / 9asharu  niswatin / on the other, i.e.  "masculine"
numerals with feminine nouns and versa vice.
    Best wishes.
                                        Mike Schub

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2)
Date: 14 Mar 2001
From: alhawar at american.edu
Subject: Ongoing Discussions/gender

>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'.

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.  What is "sewwah"  ?

>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.

Now, while you are providing few exceptions, you are confusing
between FuSHaa and colloqiual.  Recall, the earliest thread of the
discussion had to do with FuSHaa.  Conflating both systems is not
possible to account for, following my precautinary remark in the
previous posting. Here are my comments to the ones that are not
masculine as you claim:

1- (fakhidh) = "thigh": is treated as feminine in FuSHaa not masculine

2- (ridf)= "buttock": synonimous with 9ajuz/kafal (lower part of body
below the back) seems to be a neoligism in the gloss you provided

3- (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)

4- (ka9b)="heel": again no such meaning in FuSHaa.  The word for
"heel" is "9aqib" and is treated as feminine.  However, "ka9b" for
"ankle" is considered part of four not two (pl.
?ak9ub/ku9uub/ki9aab), hence being masculine is not problematic

5- (jafn)="eylid": is considered part of four (pl.
?ajfun/?ajfaan/jufuun (upper and lower eyelid) not one of two, hence
again not problematic to pattern

6- (mebyaD)= ovary: seems to be a neoligism

7-(kuu9)="elbow": kuu9 in FuSHaa means the part of wrest next to the
thumb or both sides of the wrest, suggesting four body parts, not
two. The word for "elbow" in FuSHaa is "mirfaq" treated as masculine.

While I haven't denied existence of expections (and if it makes you
happier, you can add Haajib "eyebrow" to the exceptions), the
rule/pattern of body parts is too obvious (identified since the early
days of Arabic grammatical tradition) to pass unnoticed or be blurred
by few exceptions for since when rules have no exceptions.

>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

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."  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.  Of course, there are many ways to speculate
on this, one of which is that you could assume that such forms may
have started with a feminine suffix and since they became
sspecialized in referring to inherently feminine attributes and
became so common that the suffix got dropped somehow.  But you really
don't need to speculate this way if you know the full behavior of
such forms.   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.

>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.

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

>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

I did not say you HAVE to collapse them.  I mentioned they "can" be
collapsed together if that helps one understand this phenomenon.


>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

Both issues are related whether you're talking about derivation or
the motivation for derivation.  If you make the (idiosyncratic or
not) lexical annotations be motivated simply based on your
observation that verbs in Arabic have to be inflected (wherebey
syntactic derivation is triggered by lexical annotation itself
triggered by syntactic motivation) without any PROPER motivation (for
an example of such a motivation consider my last comment below) then
this is a clearly cyclic argument. Note additionally, in VSO order,
where the subject is non-real feminine, the subject does not need to
agree in gender with the verb:

e.g.,  "Tala9a sh-shamsu"   = "Tala9ati sh-shamsu"

"The sun rose."

>and I don't know of any morphological or phonological ones.  I would
>be happy if you could open my eyes to these.

Certainly, if you don't like the earlier example with respect to
names of countries.  Here are some more examples that are
morphologically (and semantically) driven.

-Derived forms that have the pattern "fa9uul" and have the meaning of
the active participle "faa9il" have the the same form for both
masculine and feminine. e.g., rajul shakuur " a thankful man"
?imra?ah shakuur "a thankful woman"

-the same with derived form that have the pattern "mif9al"

-Derived forms that have the pattern "fa9iil" and have the meanining
of "faa9il" then gender distinction is needed

e.g.,  rajul kariim "a generous man" ?imra?ah kariim-ah "a generous woman"

-Derived forms that have the patterns "fa9iil" and have the meanining
of the passive participle "maf9uul" have often the same form for both
the masculine and the feminine

e.g., rajul jariiH "a wounded man" ?imra?ah jariiH "a wounded woman"

(Note here with respect to the last one, to avoid ambiguity the
feminine suffix has to surface if the form occurs as a nominal
without a govenining head noun: e.g., ra?aytu jariiH-ah " I saw a
wounded female.")

These forms are so common and productive that they are even included
by ?ibn Maalik in his ?alfyyah on Arabic grammar.

>>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.

Ok. assume you have a form, say baaliT, and suppose that this is the
default stem, you would need, for example, two sets of affixes, one
for masculine, say, {-oh} and one for feminine {-ah}.  The
implication of this is that you have some sort of redundancy or a
system that may be less effecient for storage, retrieval, and
production purposes.  Now, in Arabic the default stem form is that of
the masculine.  As I mentioned other languages exhibit a similar
tendenacy.  For further implications and/or insights on this
phenomenon, I recommend R. Beard's (1995) _Lexeme Morpheme Base
Morphology_ and M. Aronoff's (1994) _Morphology by Itself)_.



>Also, I do not know why samaa? is feminine but wafaa?, galaa?, and
>walaa? are masculine.

With respect to wafaa?, galaa?, walaa?, these are  forms whose
endings are not the same as the feminine gender ending -aa? (?alif
?t-ta?niith ?al-mamduudah).  In other words, these are masculine
forms as opposed to forms that have the patterns fa9laa? (nouns and
adjectives where the masculine adjective has the pattern of ?af9al),
?af9ilaa?, fa9lalaa?, fi9aalaa?, fu9lulaa?, faa9uulaa?, faa9ilaa?,
fi9liyaa? (e.g., kibriyaa?), etc, whose endings are identified as the
feminine suffix {-aa?}. (You can consider these additional examples
of morphology-driven gender markings.)  As for samaa?, there is
disagreement as to whether it is exclusively treated as feminine or
both as masculine and feminine.  Another opinion suggets that it is
the plural form of samaa?ati, hence its treatment as feminine.   If
you don't accept this last justification, you may simply want to
consider the form as irregular.  If you recall, I suggested for the
purpose of the initial discussion that samaa? be collapsed with
"crypto-feminine" class of nominals.



>Finally, I do not know why lubnaan is masculine whereas 3umaan is feminine.

I'm glad you asked.  While names of countries that end with  {-aan}
marking are treated as masculine, 9umaan is treated as feminine for
one simple reason: the noun by which it is governed, salTan-ah, is
feminine (salTan-at 9umaan).  This is similar to the observation that
all names of languages in Arabic (since the head noun is lugha-ah
"language") as well as cities (since the governing head noun is
madiin-ah/bald-ah "city/town") are treated as feminine including
those that end with {-aan}; e.g., 9ammaan.  Now, this, not
crypto-feminine nominals, is an example of syntactic gender and you
can see the proper motivation for the modifying word to take on a
gender marking.

Hope this helps clarify certain issues.

Mohammad T. Alhawary

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End of Arabic-L: 14 Mar 2001