3.2 Two Genders — Epoché
What you will be able to do Say that Arabic has two genders and no third, and that every noun has one. Recognise the feminine ending on sight and read مَدْرَسَة , سَيَّارَة and سَاعَة as feminine before you know what they mean. Name the four groups of feminine nouns that carry no ending at all, among them أَرْض and شَمْس . Use the ending on an adjective or a verb as evidence about the gender of a noun you do not know. Avoid the two traps: a masculine noun that ends in the feminine letter, and the belief that gender follows meaning. Prerequisites : 3.1 and the two-part sentence The last lesson asked you to take gender on trust. This one settles it, because nothing else in Arabic grammar can be done without it: adjectives agree in gender, verbs agree in gender, pronouns and possessive endings and demonstratives all agree in gender, and the whole machinery seizes up if you do not know which gender a noun has. The good news is that Arabic is easier here than French or German. There are two genders rather than three, one ending marks the majority of the feminine ones, and the feminine nouns that carry no ending fall into four groups that can be listed on a postcard. The pattern One letter does most of the work The great majority of feminine nouns end in a single letter, the one called the tied ta that you met in 0.8: a round letter with two dots, written only at the end of a word. If a noun ends in it, the noun is feminine, and the rule has very few exceptions. Almost every word you have met with that ending is feminine, and you can check this against the whole of the last volume: the school, the library, the letter, the study, the writing, the reading, the station, the tent. All feminine, all recognisable at a glance. The same ending also makes a feminine out of a masculine. Add it to the word for a student and you have a female student; add it to the word for a teacher and you have a woman teacher; add it to an adjective and you have the form that goes with a feminine noun. That is the same ending doing a second job, and it is why an adjective's ending tells you the gender of the noun in front of it. The feminines with no ending A minority of nouns are feminine without carrying anything to show it. They have to be learned, and the sensible way to learn them is by the four groups they fall into. Women and female animals. A word that names a female is feminine whatever it looks like. The word for a girl or daughter has no ending and is feminine; so are the words for a mother, a sister and a bride. Nothing could be more natural, and no learner gets these wrong. Parts of the body that come in pairs. The hand, the eye, the foot, the ear, the leg. This is a real and useful generalisation, and the odd thing is that it works: a part of the body that is single, such as the nose or the head, is masculine. Countries, cities and winds. Place names are feminine almost without exception, which is why a sentence about a country takes a feminine adjective even when the name looks masculine. A short list of old words. The sun, the earth, the fire, the soul, the house in one of its words, the cup, the war. These simply have to be memorised, and there are about twenty of them in common use. The sun and the earth are the two you will meet first and the two worth learning today. Using the agreement as evidence Here is the practical payoff, and it is the reason this lesson sits where it does. If you do not know whether a noun is feminine, look at what agrees with it. In the sentences below, the earth is followed by an adjective with the feminine ending, and that is how a reader who did not know the word would learn its gender. The sun is preceded by a verb with a feminine ending, and the same applies. Arabic scatters this information generously, and a reader who is watching for it will pick up the gender of most nouns without ever consulting a dictionary. Two traps The first is that a handful of masculine nouns end in the feminine letter. The commonest by far is the word for a caliph, and there are perhaps a dozen others, mostly names and titles of men. They are masculine because what they name is male, and the ending is there for historical reasons that do not concern a beginner. Treat them as a very short list of exceptions. The second trap is more insidious, because it is a habit of mind rather than a fact. Gender in Arabic is not about meaning. The sun is feminine and the moon is masculine, and no fact about the sun or the moon explains it; German makes the sun feminine too but French makes it masculine, and all three languages are describing the same object. Do not look for a reason. Learn the word with its gender, exactly as you learn it with its plural. There is one more thing to say, and it is the rule that surprises every learner: a plural of non-human things is treated as a feminine singular. You met this in 2.7 with the doors, and in 3.1 with the colours. It is not an exception to gender; it is a separate and very general rule, and it means that a great many feminine endings you will see belong to plurals rather than to feminine nouns. How English says it English has no grammatical gender at all. It has natural gender in its pronouns, so that a woman is she and a table is it, but no noun changes its form and no adjective agrees with anything. An English speaker therefore has nothing to transfer, which is in some ways an advantage: there is no wrong system to unlearn. The habit an English speaker does have to break is the assumption that it exists. There is no it in Arabic. Every noun is he or she, and a sentence about a book uses the masculine pronoun while a sentence about a car uses the feminine one. When you translate into English, both become it, and the information is simply lost; when you read Arabic, both are visible and they help you keep track of which noun a pronoun refers to. A speaker who has done French or Spanish will recognise the machinery at once and should note the two differences. A