Lesson 6 - Feminine

If you ever studied French, German or Spanish in school, you will probably be familiar with the idea that some words are masculine and some words are feminine. This is easy to understand when you are looking at words for people, such as

أمّ

(umm) mother

بنت

(bint) girl

words masculine words for people can often be made feminine by adding a ta marbuta, such as...

مسلمة

(muslimah) female muslim

مدرّسة

(mudarrisa) female teacher

ممرّضة

(mumarriDa) female nurse

مسلم

(muslim) male muslim

مدرّس

(mudarris) male teacher

ممرّض

(mumarriD)male nurse

As we have seen above, with many words for people we can make them masculine or feminine by adding or taking away the ta marbuta. However, there are also words for objects/things that are grammatically feminine as can be seen by their ta marbuta endings shown in red. We already came accross the following:

إبرة

(ibra) needle

سيّارة

(sayyaara) car

وردة

(warda) rose

قطّة

(qiTTa) cat

With such words, the ta marbuta is permanant. You can not remove it to make a masculine version of the word. Similarly you may not add a ta marbuta to the end of masculine words to try and make them feminine. Some words are permanantly masculine, such as:

كتاب

(kitaab) book

باب

(baab) door

ولد

(walad) boy

Adding or taking away a ta marbuta to these words (words that describe a thing rather than a person) will either change the whole meaning of the word, or may create something which is not a real word in the arabic language.

Remember the following as a basic rule : Words that end in ta marbuta are feminine - [there are a handful of exceptions such as the word :

خليفة
(khaleefa) Caliph

but this is very rare] and 99.9% of all words ending in ta marbuta are feminine.

When you are describing a feminine word with an adjective, you also must add the ta marbuta ending to the adjective (describing word). Look at the following examples:

بنت صغيرة

(bint Sagheera) a small girl

قطّة جميلة

(qiTTa jameela) a beautiful cat

مدرّسة ذكيّة

(mudarrisa dhakiyya) a clever female teacher