Module 3 Topic 3

lET'S START!

GENDER Arabic has a two-gender system that classifies all nouns in masculine or feminine. This applies to both animate nouns (people, animals) and inanimate nouns (objects, food, tools, clothing, etc). NUMBER Words in Arabic can be singular or plural, like in English and many other languages (e.g., “car” is singular, and “cars” is plural).

And how can I know whether a word is masculine or feminine?

That's easy! A straightforward method is to observe whether a noun ends with a marker called "تاء مربوطة" (Tāʾ Marbūṭah), also known as the "Tied Ta" or "End-Of-Word Ta." This marker, often pronounced as "t" or "ah," serves as an indicator of the noun's feminine gender. If the word does not have this marker, it usually means it is masculine (there are a few exceptions).

Let's see some examples! You can observe the feminine marker in red in the table below:

Conversely, words lacking the Tāʾ Marbūṭah ending tend to be predominantly masculine. See below an example of two masculine words:

Let's practice! Remember to look for the presence or absence of the feminine marker (e.g., ) to determine the gender of the word.

I see! So, feminine nouns end with the "End-Of-Word Ta" or Tāʾ Marbūṭah marker, often pronounced as "t" or "ah": If the word does not have this marker, most likely it is masculine. I have a question. Can the gender of a word change?

Excellent question! Words representing objects will never change their gender. To give an example, this means that the word “bag”, will always be a feminine word, and the word “book” will always be masculine. This also happens in other languages like for example French, Russian, or Spanish. However, other words referring to people can have both masculine and feminine forms in Arabic.

The good news is that it's relatively simple to transform a word from its masculine form to its feminine form, and vice versa. For instance, if you say, "I am a male teacher" in Arabic, you would say "ustādh - أستاذ," and to form the feminine version, you would only need to add the Tāʾ Marbūṭah at the end of the word, resulting in "أستاذة - ustādhah.

Let's try this exercise!

Now that you know about gender, let's talk about the singular and plural forms. Let's go to the next slide!

But first... Did you know that in Arabic "plural" starts from three?

That's right! There is the singular, the dual, and the plural forms.

Going from the singular to the dual form is easy, and both masculine and feminine words use the same pattern. In this course, we will focus on the formation of the plural nous.

There are two types of plural nouns in Arabic. 1. Sound plurals: they are formed using a fixed, regular formula or pattern. 2. Broken plurals: they don’t follow any particular rule or pattern, and their irregular form must simply be learnt by heart. In this course, we will focus on the sound plurals.

The sound plural is formed by adding an ending or suffix to the singular masculine noun. These endings vary depending on the gender of the word. In other words, they are different for masculine and feminine nouns.

• For the feminine plural form: add "aat – ات"
• For the masculine plural form: add "woon – ون"

Let's see some examples in the next slide.

Remember!

Let's practice!

One final note: In Arabic, the number and gender of the adjective and the noun must match when the noun represents people.

Nouns representing things, follow a different matching rule. We will not present this rule in this course.

This means that if the noun is masculine, the corresponding adjective must also be masculine, and if it is feminine, its adjective must also be feminine. The same goes for the number. If the noun is singular, its adjective must be singular. If the noun is dual, the corresponding adjective must also be in dual form. And if it's plural, then the adjective will be plural.

Credit: https://arabicpath.com/basic-arabic/arabic-dual#arabic-dual-form

Well, good job! Now you are ready to take the course short quiz "Nouns in Arabic"!