If a word ends with open ت or tied ة does both ت indicates at the end of the word that the word is feminine in arabic linguistics like ٱللَّتَ feminine form of word Allah in Quran 53:19?
-
1"Indicate" is vague. Do you mean "absolutely prove", or "suggests the likelihood"? – user6726 Nov 4 '19 at 16:16
-
Your question might be well received on Islam.SE – OmarL Nov 4 '19 at 16:23
-
absolutely prove :) – Bilal Khan Nov 4 '19 at 17:21
-
I don't think you can "absolutely prove" anything ت – Robert Columbia Nov 6 '19 at 14:21
A /t/ suffix makes a noun feminine in many Afro-Asiatic languages. However, in many of these languages (including Arabic), it's gotten lenited over time, and is now pronounced as [h] or silent: زَوْجَة /zawɟat/ [zawɟah] "wife". When a suffix is added, the pronunciation is still [t]: زَوْجَتيِ /zawɟatiː/ [zawɟatiː] "my wife"—the lenition only happens word-finally. So in Arabic, only when it's word-final, this /t/ is written with the glyph for /h/ plus the dots of /t/, showing both the underlying phoneme and its pronunciation.
However, in Arabic, this lenition happened only after /a/: if there wasn't an /a/, like in أُخْت /ʔukt/ [ʔukt] "sister", the /t/ remained [t], and is written with the normal glyph for /t/. So one hypothesis about 'Allat is that it was previously pronounced /ʔalilaːt/ (based on a transcription in Herodotus), with a long /aː/, which blocked the lenition, and that this archaic pronunciation persisted until after the lenition stopped being productive.
Alternately, the word may have fossilized before the lenition happened, or the [t] pronunciation might have been kept specifically to keep it from becoming homophonous with 'Allah. Or it may have come from an unrelated root L-T-T "knead". I'm not sure if there's a scholarly consensus on which of these is right. But there are definitely feminine nouns with a normal ta at the end, and I believe 'Allat is definitely grammatically feminine (based on agreement), so I wouldn't read too much into it.
-
Thank you so very much brother for this info now i understand that if a word ends at ت or ة both indicates that the word is feminine! right brother? :) – Bilal Khan Nov 4 '19 at 17:18
-
@BilalKhan Often yes, but not always. Unrelated words can also end in
/t/for unrelated reasons. – Draconis Nov 4 '19 at 23:04
ت and ة can appear at the end of a word for a number of reasons in Arabic (presumably classical Arabic is the real scope of the question). An example of a non-feminine is كتبت "I wrote". Hence you need to also include the provision that the text is fully vocalized: كَتَبْتُ. But you also have to exclude the imperative of any root ending in /t/, or modern nouns like البزموت. As far as I know, بُعُولَة "husbands" is a masculine (plural) noun and خَلِيفَة "caliph" is masculine singular. This article discusses criteria for gender assignment in Quranic Arabic, which is not trivial.
