# اللغات السامية (non-human plural adjective agreement)



## Talib

Just curious, why is "Semitic languages" translated لغات سامية? Why doesn't the second word agree in number?


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## clevermizo

It's just the typical rule that non-human/inanimate plurals take feminine singular adjective and verb agreement.


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## Talib

Oh yes, I forgot about that rule. Thanks.


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## SNZLEX

why so? what is the logic?


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## Faylasoof

Grammatical rules don't have to always follow some absolute logic! This rule, like some others, in Arabic and various languages, follows a convention of ancient origin. We just need to remember them and remember how / when to use them.


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## clevermizo

My gut instinct is that it is related to understanding the plural inanimate/non-human as a collective, and that we ought not to think of the agreed form as "feminine" specifically, but that it is simply the form that agrees with a "bulk" of something, things taken together as a whole. Compare also العرب تقول, which also uses an apparently "feminine" singular agreement.

Nevertheless I agree with Faylasoof, that it's just a grammatical rule of a language, at the learner ought to treat it as arbitrary and simply learn it.


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## Faylasoof

I don't know what the original thought behind SNZLEX's question was, but the collection of inanimates etc. could just as well have been chosen (in ancient times) to be a masculine singular rather than a feminine singular! 

... and I assume that العرب تقول is used more in Classical Arabic? A bit like ظھرت الرجال instead of ظھر الرجال - very classical construction.

Anyway, we do agree that these are rules one just has to remember whatever the original reasoning behind them may have been.


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## SNZLEX

thnx a lot


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## clevermizo

Faylasoof said:


> I don't know what the original thought behind SNZLEX's question was, but the collection of inanimates etc. could just as well have been chosen (in ancient times) to be a masculine singular rather than a feminine singular!



Oh yes of course, I'm sure the real reason is obscured through history, but I was just taking a stab at a general formulation of a theory. I agree naturally that such hypotheses have nothing to do with actual language learning itself, in which you just have to memorize and take certain things for granted.


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## AbdulJabbar

We use the term "grammar rules" as if they were rules, but in fact they are explanations of how things are said, not rules to which the language must conform. 

The adjective system is bad enough, but the genders of nouns is really hard to explain. Do you native speakers have a way to remember? 

Once in Saudi, I said 5aymAt for "tents" instead of 5ayam, and the Saudis had a strong reaction to it. One of them, in broken English, said that I made it sound "like a woman-thing." Tents are very masculine, I guess.


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## clevermizo

AbdulJabbar said:


> We use the term "grammar rules" as if they were rules, but in fact they are explanations of how things are said, not rules to which the language must conform.



Actually on this forum a grammar rule is typically understood in a linguistic sense: i.e., a description of the state of affairs, a formal theory of how speech or written phenomena occur. 



> The adjective system is bad enough, but the genders of nouns is really hard to explain. Do you native speakers have a way to remember?


Native speakers are native speakers. That's tantamount to asking why a native speaker of anything can remember anything that seems fairly arbitrary in a descriptive system. In English we add an "s" to the third person singular of present tense verbs. Do we have some special trick to remember that? I think it has been stressed throughout this thread that grammar rules (or descriptive accounts, whatever you want to call them), for learners, simply must be learned. The topic of this thread, I would like to point out, is _not_ grammatical gender of nouns. It is the grammatical gender of _adjectives_ that agrees with plural forms of inanimate nouns. The origin or logic of grammatical gender categories of nouns in any language is entirely a different kettle of fish.



> Once in Saudi, I said 5aymAt for "tents" instead of 5ayam, and the Saudis had a strong reaction to it. One of them, in broken English, said that I made it sound "like a woman-thing." Tents are very masculine, I guess.


You may have misunderstood the response you received. Without linguistic training it may be difficult to sort out grammatical gender from natural gender, and the interlocutor in question may have been trying to tell you that you were using the plural as if it were a feminine, human animate noun that takes an -aat plural (although it would be easier for him/her to say "like a woman-thing"). This person may or may not have been ascribing any essentialist sex qualities to the tent.


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## elroy

It's _5iyam_, by the way, and I don't have a way to remember that. 

As others have said, some things simply have to be learned.  The phenomenon being discussed here is a good example.  It's a quirk of Arabic, if you will, for which there may or may not be a historical explanation.


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## be.010

Hi Everyone!


AbdulJabbar said:


> The adjective system is bad enough, but the genders of nouns is really hard to explain. Do you native speakers have a way to remember?


Regarding the genders of nouns, there is really no general rule, of course, they just have to be learned as most guys said! Yet here are some rules for certain cases: (Maybe much of this is rather a summary of the rules included in the posts, I hope it would help...)
1- The ta2 marboota (ة) at the end of a word, _most often _indicates that it is feminine...

2- And, as a rule, the plural of (almost) anything except humans is FEMININE (both plural and singular feminine pronouns can be used with the plural of non-humans). 



AbdulJabbar said:


> Once in Saudi, I said 5aymAt for "tents" instead of 5ayam, and the Saudis had a strong reaction to it. One of them, in broken English, said that I made it sound "like a woman-thing."


 
Actually, even 5iyam (tents) is considered feminine (such as الخيام الكبيرة Al-5iyam-ul-kabiira). This includes اللغات السامية
(اللغات الساميات is also grammatically right, but uncommon)...

By the way, 5aymat is not "wrong", and I think that considering them a "woman-thing" is a local issue... 
E.g. in Damascus local dialect the word "5eimat" is common, but 5iyam isn't...

Almost as a rule, in MSA, the form of 5aymat (i.e. plural form that end with -at) _often_ indicates that they are few... (e.g. you can say 5amsu 5aymat = five tents, 5iyam katheera = many/a lot of tents...). 
There is an exception of this last rule, however. It's when the -at form is the only plural form of the word... As in السيارات Assayyarat = cars regardless of being few or many...

Best regards!


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## AbdulJabbar

Thanks for the information!
شكرن جزيلاً!


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## Bilbo Baggins

clevermizo said:


> It's just the typical rule that non-human/inanimate plurals take feminine singular adjective and verb agreement.



Interesting. What about when singular feminine inanimate nouns take a sound masculine plural? Is the verb agreement still feminine? And what about the vice versa situation? When masculine singular nouns take a sound feminine plural, what is the verb agreement then?

Thanks.


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## relates

Bilbo Baggins said:


> Interesting. What about when singular feminine inanimate nouns take a sound masculine plural? Is the verb agreement still feminine? And what about the vice versa situation? When masculine singular nouns take a sound feminine plural, what is the verb agreement then?



It's always feminine as long as it's non-human and over three. It makes things a whole lot easier, in my opinion.


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## clevermizo

Bilbo Baggins said:


> Interesting. What about when singular feminine inanimate nouns take a sound masculine plural?



Please provide an example; I'm not sure what you're talking about.



> When masculine singular nouns take a sound feminine plural, what is the verb agreement then?
> 
> Thanks.



Inanimate plurals in general take singular, feminine agreement in verbs and adjectives.


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## Bilbo Baggins

clevermizo said:


> Please provide an example; I'm not sure what you're talking about.



Gosh, I don't think that I can; my vocabulary is so small. I was asking about nouns that are feminine in the singular but take a sound masculine ending. I was wondering whether they become masculine syntactically when in the plural.


clevermizo said:


> Inanimate plurals in general take singular, feminine agreement in verbs and adjectives.



Thanks for your help.


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## clevermizo

Bilbo Baggins said:


> Gosh, I don't think that I can; my vocabulary is so small. I was asking about nouns that are feminine in the singular but take a sound masculine ending. I was wondering whether they become masculine syntactically when in the plural.



I asked for an example because I don't think that this ever occurs. Inanimate nouns don't get the ending ـون/ـين and not feminine nouns in general. Feminine nouns denoting _people_ sometimes get this ending colloquially (where there's often a loss of gender in the plural) but not in standard Arabic.


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## Bilbo Baggins

clevermizo said:


> I asked for an example because I don't think that this ever occurs. Inanimate nouns don't get the ending ـون/ـين and not feminine nouns in general.



Really? I thought someone here, a more experienced member, mentioned something about some nouns switching genders when pluralized.


> Feminine nouns denoting _people_ sometimes get this ending colloquially (where there's often a loss of gender in the plural) but not in standard Arabic.



OK. Well, colloquial Arabic is in the future for me. I've made a friend at university who is an Egyptian national studying here. She agreed to speak with me in Cairene if I agreed to help her with her mathematics, but that's a ways off. Right it's all about the MSA.


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## clevermizo

Bilbo Baggins said:


> Really? I thought someone here, a more experienced member, mentioned something about some nouns switching genders when pluralized.



Again, if you'd like to discuss this more please find the quote or the example. Nouns don't "switch" genders, but this might have been an inexact way of referring to the fact that inanimate plurals take (singular) feminine agreement, regardless of their gender. 

بيوت كبيرة - big houses (بيت is masculine)
سيارات كبيرة - big cars (سيارة is feminine)

Anyway 'switching' genders or not, this is still something different from what you said above, which is "singular feminine nouns" receiving "sound masculine plurals." The "sound masculine plural" ـون is not used for inanimate nouns. It can be used for people where a group is of mixed gender: المدرسون - the teachers (m. or m.&f.) whereas المدرسات - the teachers (only f.). The plural ending ـون/ـين being used for groups of people of mixed gender is probably the reason for it being commonly used for women in colloquial, however some people do make a point even in colloquial of using the ـات plural for groups of women.


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## AndyRoo

Bilbo Baggins said:


> Really? I thought someone here, a more experienced member, mentioned something about some nouns switching genders when pluralized.



Please Bilbo, can we have examples? Failing that a link to the previous thread. It really is difficult to work out what the question is without examples.


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## Bilbo Baggins

Forgive the lateness of my reply; I've been a bit busy. 

At any rate, I can't find the post to which I originally referred. However, I found something in my grammar that confuses me a bit. My book lists two examples of nouns that are feminine singular but have "sound masculines". They are:  أَرض and   سَنَة  However, my text lists their "sound masculine" forms as   أَرَضونَ  and  سِنونَ             Clearly, these are not true sound masculine plurals as there is a changing of the internal voweling. It seems that these plural forms are somewhere in between broken and sound. What do you all think of this?


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## relates

I don't mean to besmirch your text, but I don't think just ending in ون necessarily qualifies a word as a 'sound masculine.' When I hear that term, I tend to think of groups of people, where as there are lots of words e.g. صحون 'plates' that _look_ like sound masculine plurals but aren't; they are, like all non-human nouns, treated as feminine singular.

Also (interestingly), there is actually also a sound _feminine_ plural for سنة, which is سنوات. I would actually say I've seen this used more frequently.


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## clevermizo

Bilbo Baggins said:


> Forgive the lateness of my reply; I've been a bit busy.
> 
> At any rate, I can't find the post to which I originally referred. However, I found something in my grammar that confuses me a bit. My book lists two examples of nouns that are feminine singular but have "sound masculines". They are:  أَرض and   سَنَة  However, my text lists their "sound masculine" forms as   أَرَضونَ  and  سِنونَ             Clearly, these are not true sound masculine plurals as there is a changing of the internal voweling. It seems that these plural forms are somewhere in between broken and sound. What do you all think of this?



These aren't very common plurals of these nouns, but I see what you mean now. However I think we'd only consider them جمع مذكر سالم if they were inflected for case: أرضون  - أرضين and سنون - سنين. If this is the case, then they are in a sense, the "sound plural." I'm not sure if this is the case, however the more common plurals are أراضٍ and سنوات (though the plural سنين is common colloquially).

However, back on topic, in any case these would be treated with singular feminine agreement grammatically as they are inanimate. So هذه الأرضون not هؤلاء الأرضون and also هذه السنون.


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## cherine

They are inflected as أرضون-أرضين، سنون-سنين .
There's a famous poetry verse saying:
ثم انطوت تلك السنون وأهلها***فكأنها وكأنهم أحلام
Note that سنون is still treated like feminine singular because they are غير عاقل .


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## Bilbo Baggins

Thanks, guys.


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## rayloom

Indeed, all these plurals are quite rare, save for سنون - سنين, which is quite commoner than سنوات.
You also have (in addition to أرضون) 
حرون plural of حَرّة
كرون plural of كرة
ثبون plural of ثبة
http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=2013028


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