género gramático

Once again, I'm updating not because I necessarily have anything worthwhile to say, but because this oft-neglected space needs some love. More of the same: the house is a mess because we have no time to pick up all the piles of books, teaching is good but not great, classes are great but the reading load is ridiculous, my husband rocks, etc., etc. Maybe this time no news is good news.

I started an Arabic class a couple of weeks ago. It's very, very low-key-- we only meet twice a week, there are no quizzes, no exams, no assignments, and no grades. The instructor is a PhD student over in Linguistics, and he does a great job of explaining the structures in simple linguistics terms. Simple? Well, I think so, but the other people in the class might not like it so well. I love it. Anyway, we blew through the alphabet and now we're learning the basics of noun phrases. Last night we learned some weird (I think) things about Arabic nouns. For those of you who can't disassociate biological gender from grammatical gender and grasp the arbitrariness of it all (I still have students who obsess about how and why a table is feminine and a book masculine), chew on this: There are some nouns that are masculine in the singular but feminine in the plural, and vice-versa. That's going to be a concordance headache for me, I know it already. Another funny arbitrary tidbit: Body parts that occur in pairs (eyes, feet, etc.) are feminine, while singular and non-dual-plural body parts (tongue, fingers, etc.) are for the most part masculine. The suspense was killing me. I asked my burning questions, and now I share with you, dear internet public: yes, in Arabic, "testicles" are feminine. Nope, nothing arbitrary about that. Ha.