al-Mudhakkar wa al-Muannath
- Author died
- 361 AH
- Editions
- al-Mudhakkar wa al-Muannath
al-Mudhakkar wa al-Muannath (The Masculine and Feminine) is a specialized grammatical treatise on grammatical gender in the Arabic language, composed by the 4th-century AH scribe and philologist Abu al-Husayn Said ibn Ibrahim al-Tustari (d. 361 AH / 972 CE) .
Thesis and Methodology
In the treatise, al-Tustari posits that masculine and feminine distinctions in Arabic cannot be governed by uniform systematic analogy (qiyas muttarid), rejecting the claim that fixed rules or markers alone determine gender . To demonstrate this, he critiques the conventional classification that attributes femininity exclusively to three formal markers—the suffix ta' / ha' (الهاء), the prolonged alif (al-alif al-mamdudah), and the shortened alif (al-alif al-maqsurah) .
He observes that all three markers frequently occur in masculine nouns:
- The suffix ha' occurs in intensive masculine descriptions such as baqiah (باقعة), nassabah (نسابة), and allamah (علامة), as well as terms like rawiyah (راوية) .
- The prolonged alif appears in masculine terms such as ayaya (عياياء), tibaqae (طباقاء), and day names like al-Thulatha' (Tuesday) and al-Arbi'a' (Wednesday) .
- The shortened alif appears in words such as khuntha (خنثى) and zub'ara (زبعرى) .
Conversely, he notes that numerous feminine words exhibit none of these markers, including proper names like Hind and Da'd, as well as anatomical terms like yad (hand), rijl (leg), saq (shin), and katif (shoulder) . Consequently, al-Tustari argues that determining gender requires reliance upon recorded linguistic transmission (al-riwayah and al-hikayah) rather than strict phonological signs .
Structure and Contents
The work opens with introductory thematic surveys addressing broad categories of gendered nouns, including:
- Names of months and days of the week .
- Toponyms, noting that place names are generally feminine unless derived from mountains, castles, or ending in alif and nun (such as Hulwan and Jurjan) .
- Collective and broken plurals .
- Intrinsically feminine words without explicit markers (such as body parts and animal names) .
- Dual-gender words whose masculine and feminine senses differ semantically (such as al-layt, al-ʿilba', al-khamr, and al-nafs) .
Following these general sections, al-Tustari arranges the problematic and ambiguous lexical items alphabetically into dedicated chapters by letter (Bab al-Alif, Bab al-Ta', Bab al-Tha', and subsequent letters) to facilitate lookup for scribes and students .
Modern Publication
The text was edited and annotated by Ahmad Abd al-Majid Haridi and published in a single volume by Maktabat al-Khanji in Cairo and Dar al-Rifa'i in Riyadh (1st edition, 1403 AH / 1983 CE) .
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