Constructing Feminine to Mean

Linguistic gender is a complex and amazing category that has puzzled and still puzzles theoretical linguists, typologists, philosophers, cognitive scientists, didacticians, as well as scholars of anthropology, culture, and even mystical (divine) sufism. In Standard and colloquial Arabic varieties, feminine morphology (unlike âcommon senseâ) is not dedicated to mark beings of the female sex (or ânatural genderâ). When you name the female of a âlionâ (Ê"asad) or a âdonkeyâ (a¸¥imaar), you use different words (labuÊ"at or Ê"ataan), as if the male and female of the same species are linguistically conceived as completely unrelated entities. When you âfeminizeâ words like âbeeâ (naa¸¥l) or âpigeonâ (a¸¥amaam), the outcome is not a noun for the animal with a different sex, but a singular of the collective âbees,â âone beeâ (naa¸¥l-at), or an individual pigeon (a¸¥amaam-at). In the opposite direction, when a singular noun âcarpenterâ (najjar) is feminized, the (unexpected) result is a special plural, or rather a group, âcarpenters as a professional groupâ (najjar-at). Since some of these words (contrastively) possess ânormalâ masculine plurals, or masculine singulars, I propose to distinguish atomicities (which are broadly âmasculineâ) from unities (which are âfeminineâ). The diversity of feminine senses is also manifested when you feminize an inherently masculine noun like âfatherâ (Ê"ab), âuncleâ (Êamm), etc. The outcome (in the appropriate performative context) is that you are endearing your father or uncle, rather than âwomanizingâ him. More âunorthodoxâ senses are evaluative, pejorative, diminutive, augmentative, etc. It is striking that gender not only plays a central role in shaping individuation, or perspectizing plurality, but it is also used to distinguish what we count, or what we quantifier over. In Arabic, when you count numbers in sequence (three, four, five, six, etc.), you use the feminine, but when you count objects, you have to ânegotiateâ for gender, due to the âgender polarityâ constraint. Your quantifier senses, which are also subtly built in the grammar, equally negotiate for gender. Wide cross-linguistic comparison extends the inventories of features, mechanisms, and typological notions used, to languages like Hebrew, Berber, Celtic, Germanic, Romance, Amazonian, etc. On the whole, gender is far from being parasitic in the grammar of Arabic or any language (including âclassifierâ languages). It is central as it has never been.