I know essentially nothing about Arabic, but I am told that Arabic nouns are gendered, and that the verbs have gendered conjugations - feel free to stop me right there if I’m wrong about that, and tell me what the real situation is. There’s probably something about plural vs singular as well.
Anyway, IF that’s the case, how would Arabic deal with the following situations - ‘spider’ being (AIUI) a feminine noun in Arabic:
“The spider, it fertilizes the egg / the spiders, they fertilize the eggs” - masculine or feminine conjugations for ‘fertilize’? Or something else? Masculine or feminine pronouns for it/they?
“The spider, it walks across the table” Masculine or feminine pronouns and conjugation in the absence of sex information?
“A spider hatches from an egg / Spiders hatch from eggs” - masculine or feminine conjugations for ‘hatch’? Or something else? No pronouns in this case.
“The male spider avoids the female” vs. “The female spider avoids the male” Same conjugation of ‘avoid’? What if it’s spiders in the plural?
Would you even say “the spider, it fertilizes the egg” in English? How about “the spider fertilizes the egg”?
Anyway, yes, Arabic nouns have gender (could be masculine or feminine), and then you have to worry about the number (1, 2, or more of them), as well as the case (nominative/accusative/genitive), definite or indefinite (a spider vs the spider), etc., and when you conjugate the verb you have to take into account the gender of the subject along with other things.
Arabic is not an Indo-European language, so there really is no point bringing German, or Sanskrit for that matter, into it—it’s not really like that. Except as far as it goes to show that concepts like gender, number, tenses are more widespread than a single language family. If you don’t like it, then Classical Chinese is for you!
It’s indeed true that Arabic genders verb conjugations, but the differences often exist only in short vowels at the end of the conjugated verbs. Look at the examples in this verb conjugation chart in Wikipedia. The phrase “you wrote” would be transliterated into the Latin script as “katabta” if said about a male and “katabti” if said about a female. The difference is the last vowel, which is short, and the differences between short and long vowels is very important in Arabic: Long vowels are always written whereas short vowels are not written by means of a letter by itself; they can be indicated by little diacritic marks above or below the letters (a process called “vocalization”), but this is optional and often omitted. In full vocalization, the male “katabta” would be written as كَتَبْتَ, where the little stroke above the last (left-most) letter indicates a short a. The female “katabti” is vocalized as كَتَبْتِ, where the short i is indicated by the little stroke below the last letter. If vocalization is omitted (as it often is), both will come down to كتبت, which consists simply of the four consonants K-T-B-T. To my knowledge, in oral speech the concluding short vowel would often be elided too.
That chart speaks for itself, but I am not sure that you would describe changes between m. and f. as “often… only in short vowels at the end”. The written form may be different. Prefixes could change, consonants could change or appear or disappear. Basically, study the bolded bits.
I put in “it fertilizes the egg” to force the use of a pronoun, which I assumed would be gendered.
The Twain reference was to highlight the concept of gendered nouns and pronouns - like a turnip being a ‘she’, or a fishwife being a ‘he’ even though a fishwife is a female human.
So in the example of ‘the spider, it fertilizes the egg’, I’m imagining that the construction goes something like:
Spider (feminine singular noun), she (feminine singular pronoun) fertilizess (my attempt at feminine singular conjugation) the egg (another feminine noun).
But then again, maybe the fact that only a male spider would fertilize an egg comes into play. Hence my question. It would still apply to ‘the spider fertilizes the egg’. As far as I know, the noun may be feminine but all the conjugations depend on the sex of the particular spider in question:
Spider (feminine singular), he (because this only makes sense for a male spider) mascilizes (masc conj of fertilize) the egg (fem).
Contrast this with something sex-neutral, like walking or hatching - again I’m guessing that the conjugations would be feminine for singular spider.
Sure, pronouns can (and usually will) change based on the gender of the subject they refer to. This is not unusual in comparison to other languages, including Indo-European one. My statement that the gendering of verbs often affects only unwritten short vowels was meant to be limited to the conjugated verb form, where this is often (though admittedly not always) the case. The reason for this limitation lies in the fact that this is unusual about Arabic: Many Indo-European languages, too, conjugate verbs, but it’s unusual for this conjugated form to depend on the gender of the person.
Perhaps a male spider would be, e.g. ذكر العنكبوت. Now ذكر = male is simply a masculine noun as far as being the subject of the verb you are going to conjugate, “spider” is no longer the subject. This construct state is another non-Indo-European feature.
I don’t even know how you would type diacritics in Arabic so bravo. I took a year of Arabic in college and had a mental breakdown early on when “madrasa” (school) was listed in the dictionary under “D-R-S” because that was the root of “to learn” (M + to learn = place of learning). Written Arabic really doesn’t like vowels.
This all seems quite similar to Hebrew. Nouns are gendered. Verbs must match their subject nouns in number, gender, and person. Verbs have a whole bunch of different forms, called “binyan” (“structure”) which are not analogous to tenses as we know them in Latin-derived languages. But each binyan has its own set of endings (or other inflections) for number, gender, and person.