I have forwarded your query to an expert in Arabic Grammar. Your quote from Wikipedia is correct. What I can inform you, based on my understanding, is that the pronoun 'ha' used in the verse is for female singular with a plural masculine noun 'butuun' indicates that it is specifically about a female bee. Also note that the word 'butuun' is plural form. This means three or more, as arabic grammar contains three number forms (singular[1], dual[2], plural[3 or more]). Hence I searched for bee anatomy and found the following links: https://insects.tamu.edu/continuing_ed/bee_biology/lectures/password/Internal_Anatomy_of_Honey_Bees_PN.pdf
http://beeinformed.org/2011/07/from-the-flower-to-the-hive/ Samiya On Sat, May 3, 2014 at 2:06 PM, LizR <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- 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.
