That's quite interesting. I assume Arabic is a language in which there are not normally masculine and feminine forms of nouns, since that would mean that there was a 50-50 chance of happening to get it right simply by luck. (For example, I'm sure the French would be overjoyed if all tables turned out to be female.) So I assume this is a language like English, with a non-gendered form for most things, and only gendered forms for things which are actually known to *have* genders, like animals and people. In that case it would be fairly startling if bees are specifically described as female when it would seem more natural to make them gender-neutral (as I believe they are in English). On the other hand, if Arabic commonly assigns random genders to genderless things (as French does with "la table") then it would be fairly insignificant, and I would expect a detailed survey of all gender assignments to things that weren't known to have a specific gender to have a hit rate around 50%.
According to Wikipedia, Nouns in Literary Arabic have three grammatical cases<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_case> > (nominative <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominative_case>, > accusative<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accusative_case>, > and genitive <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genitive_case> [also used when > the noun is governed by a preposition]); > threenumbers<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammatical_number> (singular, > dual and plural); *two > **genders*<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_(grammar)>* (masculine > and feminine)*; and three "states" (indefinite, definite, and > construct<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Status_constructus> > ). I'm not very well up on languages, and there appear to be several varieties of Arabic, but that quote certainly appears to indicate there is no neutral form, like the German "das" (or the English "the") but that *all* nouns in Arabic are assigned a gender, as in French ("le" or "la"). That would make the fact that bees are described as female simply a linguistic artefact that happens to have come out the right way (a 50% chance, as I said) rather than any deep insight into which gender they in fact are. Since it's fairly crucial to your argument, can you explain how gender assignment works in the particular form of Arabic that is being used in this case? PS By the way, what's this? Am I missing something? Here, "the bee" appears to be masculine. (16:68:4) l-naḥli <http://corpus.quran.com/qurandictionary.jsp?q=nHl#(16:68:4)> the bee, <http://corpus.quran.com/wordmorphology.jsp?location=(16:68:4)>*N* – genitive masculine noun → Bee <http://corpus.quran.com/concept.jsp?id=bee> اسم مجرور -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
