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Lesson Review
Now that we’ve finished studying Status and Number of ﺍاﺳﻢ, we are going to move on to the
third category of ﺍاﺳﻢ: Gender. Every ﺍاﺳﻢ in Arabic is either masculine or feminine.
In English we refer to people, places, things, etc. as ‘he,’ ‘she,’ or ‘it.’ In Arabic we only have ‘he’
and ‘she.’ There is no ‘it.’ It would not make sense to attempt to memorize the gender of every
word you come across; thus, there is an easier way. All words are masculine by default and will
only be feminine due to certain characteristics.
What we are actually doing when studying Gender is studying feminine words. We will learn
what they are and how to recognize them. Because all other words are masculine, we don’t
need to study them in order to be able to recognize them.
There are two kinds of feminine words:
1. Real Feminine: a word that means something that is actually female
a. Examples: mother, sister, daughter, aunt, cow
b. All of these people (and animal) are actually females so we don’t have to go any
further. Common sense tells us that the word for ‘mother’ would be a real
feminine word.
2. Fake Feminine: words that are not actually female, but are referred to as ‘she’
regardless. The Arabs chose to refer to some things as feminine, even though they are
not actually female. There are three different categories of Fake Feminine:
a. Words ending in:
i. ﺓة: This is the most common way of finding fake feminine words. Most
words with this letter at the end are feminine.
1. For example, remember the Mulimah chart: ٌﺴﻠِ َﻤﺔ
ْ ُﻣ, ً ُﻣ ْﺴﻠِ َﻤﺔ, ُﻣ ْﺴﻠِ َﻤ ٍﺔ
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ii. ﻯى/ﺁآء: There are specific types of words that are feminine when they end
with either of these letters, but not all Arabic words, so this doesn’t
always work. These letters work in specific cases, and you’ll learn them in
time.
b. Broken plurals (recall that there are two types):
i. Non-‐human broken plurals
1. These are always considered as ‘she’ (feminine, singular), but it’s a
fake ‘she’ because these non-‐human words aren’t actually female.
Thus, non-‐human broken plurals are fake feminine.
ii. Human broken plurals: As we learned earlier, we can call these ‘she.’ By
doing that, we consider them to be fake feminine.
c. Feminine because the Arabs said so
i. These are a very specific set of words, which we will learn in the next
class
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