On Apr 3, 2005, at 6:43 AM, Patrick Littell wrote:
> Since someone is going to bring it up eventually, I figure I'll do it:
> Proto-Semitic polarity.  The plurals of masculine nouns being feminine
> and plurals of feminine nouns being masculine.  (Scads weirder than
> Moro, in my opinion, although probably not indicative of any sort of
> excessive gender-bending among ancient Semitic peoples.)  There's
> still bits of this in Arabic, mostly of the masculine singular =>
> feminine plural variety.  I can't say I understand the details, so
> I'll leave it to one of our resident Semiticists to fill me in.  Did
> this also work with explicitly sexed groups?  I think it doesn't with
> modern "walad" (boy); "awlad" (boys) is still masculine (right?), even
> though most of the nouns I know in that plural-class go through
> polarity.

I'm pretty sure that in Arabic, only non-human (or non-animate?) plural
nouns take singular feminine agreement; humans take masculine or
feminine depending on gender/sex.
I remember learning a theory that the masculine feminine-looking
numbers in Semitic started as some kind of collective, but i don't
remember if that theory said the same thing about feminine forms in
general.


-Stephen (Steg)
  "...i gave you love / you gave me fire
   i took you in / you took me higher
   if i wasn't what you wanted
   then tell me what it was..."
     ~ cailyn's song #2 ("all of me") by jms