УДК 81

Expressing gender in Modern Persian language

Голами Хамидеx Хасан – студентка магистратуры Филологического факультете Уфимского университета науки и технологий; преподаватель иностранных языков Башкирского государственного медицинского университета.

Abstract: Modern Persian is a gender free language and nouns and pronouns don't have grammatical gender features. In some contexts, scientific, categorizing animals as male and female is needed and addressing pronouns as men/women in the context of defending women’s rights is necessary, how Modern Persian is showing this necessity in these contexts and other contexts? This article explains strategy of Modern Persian in order to express gender for categorizing animals,plants, cloths, some places and jobs for/as male and female in its structure.

Аннотация: Современный персидский язык является гендерно-нейтральным. В нем существительные и местоимения не имеют грамматических гендерных признаков. В некоторых научных контекстах необходимо классифицировать животных на мужских и женских особей, также следует обращаться к местоимениям с разделением на мужские и женские в контексте защиты прав женщин. Как современный персидский язык проявляет данную необходимость в этих и других контекстах? Настоящая статья объясняет стратегию современного персидского языка по выражению гендера при отнесении животных, растений, одежды, некоторых мест и профессий к мужскому и женскому роду в его структуре.

Keywords: gender, male, female, categorizing

Ключевые слова : пол, мужчина, женщина, категоризация.

Relevance

It is widely acknowledged that grammatical gender constitutes a significant part of the structural complexity of languages [4, p. 7−13]. Modern Persian doesn’t have this structural complexity for its nouns and pronouns. Ancestor of Modern Persian, Old Persian had three genders for nouns and it is diachronically established that gender as a grammatical category is stable. It means languages having this grammatical feature won’t lose it and free-gender languages won’t get it but in spite of this stability, there are some languages which have lost it and Modern Persian is one of these cases [5]. Today, Modern Persian as an official language in Iran, for some contexts and categories depends on gender and adds these genders as necessary characteristics to the nouns.

Noun as a part of speech takes gender and pronoun also and in Modern Persian there is no gender sign for noun at the end. Albeit Arabic language affected on Persian and nouns that came from Arabic have gender in appearance but not in the meaning and lexical context . For example, Arabic plural nouns have gender. The word "hurt" or "injury" in Persian means "sadameh" "صدمه" and has "h" at the end that is the sign of feminine in Arabic and plural of it "صدمات" also in Arabic is feminine, "at" "ات" is the sign of feminine plural so in Persian apparently has the sign of gender but in the meaning is without any gender [2].

Arabic loan words in Persian grammatically are free gender. There is an exception, proper nouns, here just people’s names, have genders and they are used for boys and girls. Ending sign “h” in Arabic words that is for feminine, in Persian names is also for feminine. Names such as Hamideh, Sa’eedeh, that have “h” at the end are for girls and names such as Hamid and Sa’eed without “h” are for boys.

If Modern Persian is totally free-gender, is there a way for showing gender of animate nouns such as animals and plants and gender of inanimate nouns such as clothes?

Most of Persian nouns denoting just human beings , express gender only lexically: girl, boy, man, woman, grandmother, grandfather and there is no grammatical sign for gender in these nouns. For animals and plants in order to express gender, femininity and masculinity as adjectives are added to the noun, this noun is a compound noun and is composed of a noun and an adjective. Here femininity and masculinity are characteristics that are related to the noun. Grammatical word order in Modern Persian is noun plus adjective, adjective comes after noun. As we know there are some types of adjectives: comparative, superlative, predicate, possessive, demonstrative and etc. Adjective type in this context for Modern Persian is declarative, an explanatory kind. Declarative adjective comes with a noun and explains characteristics of a noun such as color, shape, form, height, taste, size, value, quantity and relationship [3].

Cognation, connection and relationship of an adjective with a noun and gender is a connective attribute for a noun. For connecting an adjective to a noun, “e” (extra e: e ezãfe) is added to the end of a noun:

Table 1.

Noun + Adjective	Transcripts in Persian	Meaning in English
Heyvãn e Mãde	حیوانِ ماده	Feminine animal
Heyvãn e Nar	حیوانِ نَر	Masculine animal
Giah e Mãde	گیاهِ ماده	Feminine plant
Giah e Nar	گیاهِ نر	Masculine plant
Shotor e Nar	شترِ نر	Feminine camel
Shotor e Mãde	شترِ ماده	Masculine camel

For example, for feminine camel, Persian has this word: "شتر ماده" and for masculine camel has "شتر نر". The words "nar and made" is being using for animals and plants [1].

Concerning femininity and masculinity for clothes and shoes, Modern Persian brings words: for girls, for boys, for men and for women after clothes and shoes as nouns. Words “Dokhtarãne”, “Pesarãne”, “Zanãne” and “Mardãne” as adjectives follow the noun and are attributed to it as characteristics and features. Albeit all clothes don’t have this attribution and some of them are divided based on gender.

Table 2.

Noun + Adjective	Transcripts in Persian	Meaning in English
Lebãs e Zanãne	لِباسِ زنانه	Women clothes
Lebãs e Mardãne	لباسِ مردانه	Men clothes
Lebãs e Dokhtarãne	لباسِ دخترانه	Girl’s clothes
Lebãs e Pesarãne	لباسِ پسرانه	Boy’s clthes
Kafsh e Mardãne	کفشِ مردانه	Men shoes
Kafshe Zanãne	کفشِ زنانه	Women shoes
Pãltoy e Zanãne	پالتویِ زنانه	Women coat
Pãltoy e Mardãne	پالتویِ مردانه	Men coat
Ti shert e Dokhtarãne	تی شرتِ دخترانه	Girl’s T-shirt
Ti shert e Pesarãne	تی شرتِ پسرانه	Boy’s T-shirt

Some places are classified based on gender too, though these days because of social changes such places are less in Persian language. Schools, barbershops, hairdressers and public bathrooms are the most frequent places that are sorting according to gender.

Table 3.

Noun + Adjective	Transcripts in Persian	Meaning in English
Madrese ye Dokhtarãne	مدرسه یِ دخترانه	Girl’s school
Madrese ye Pesarãne	مدرسه یِ پسرانه	Boy’s school
Ãrãyeshgãh e Mardãne	آرایشگاهِ مردانه	Barbershop
Ãrãyeshgãh e Zanãne	آرایشگاهِ زنانه	Hairdresser
Hamãm e Mardãne	حمامِ مردانه	Men Public bathroom
Hamãm e Zanãne	حمامِ زنانه	Women Public bathroom

In order to denoting gender in some jobs, prestigious jobs, social titles: Mr and Ms come before jobs. These titles expressing the gender and also are being used for respect at the time of calling. Social title for men with “ye” is attaching to jobs. For gynecologist, Persian translation is “متخصصِ زنان” that it means a women specialist or a specialist for women. All these below combinations are noun phrases and as a subject or an object of a sentence are playing a role.

Table 4.

Title+ job	Transcripts in Persian	Meaning in English
Khanom doktor	خانم دکتر	Ms. Doctor
Ãgha ye doktor	آقایِ دکتر	Mr. Doctor
Khanom Mo’alem	خانم معلم	Ms. Teacher
Ãgha ye Mo’alem	آقایِ معلم	Mr.Teacher
Khanom Mohandes	خانم مهندس	Ms. Engineer
Ãgha ye Mohandes	آقایِ مهندس	Mr. Engineer

In Modern Persian, pronouns also don’t have gender and in some contexts that expressing gender is necessary, speaker brings words: boy, girl, man and woman (in plural form also) after Subject pronouns to show gender and it’s a matter of emphasizing, emphasizing rights for women or addressing a group of men or women generally. After second person singular or second person plural pronouns, also after first person plural form and third person plural pronouns, words such as men and women come.For second person singular, “ye” comes for connecting to next word.

Table 5.

Personal Pronoun+ nouns denoting gender	Transcripts in Persian	Meaning in English
To ye Zan (To = second person singular pronoun)	تویِ زن	You Woman (You, second Person singular)
To ye Mard	تویِ مرد	You Man
Mã Zan hã	ما زن ها	We Women
Mã Mard hã	ما مرد ها	We Men
Shomã Zan hã (Shomã= second person plural)	شما زن ها	You Women (You, second person plural)
Shomã Mard hã	شما مرد ها	You Men
Shomã Dokhtar hã	شما دختر ها	You Girls
Shomã Pesar hã	شما پسر ها	You Boys

Results

Grammatical gender as an independent concept is absent in Modern Persian. Method of Persian language in order to express gender in some contexts that denoting gender required, is using adjectives declaring gender. Words such as male, female, man, woman, girl, boy, women, men, boys and girls follow noun and as gender characteristics are attributed to the nouns. These adjectives express relation type that exists between them and nouns. As a result, Modern Persian uses compound nouns (noun+adjective) to manifest gender for categorizing and dividing animals, plants, some clothes, some places, jobs and pronouns as male/female or man and woman. 

References

1. Abolghasemi, Mahmoud, Historical Grammar of Persian language, 4^th edition, Tehran , Samt Publication.2004, p. 43.
2. Alshartouni Rashid, principles of Arabic, Fourth Volume, Translated by Mohammad Javad Shariat, 7^th edition, Tehran , Asatir publication. 2003, p. 97.
3. Anvari Hasan, Givi Ahmadi Hasan: Persian Language Grammar, Second Volum, Fatemi Publication, Tehran, 2011, p. 144.
4. Audring, Jenny: Gender as a complex feature. Language Sciences 2014, 43. p. 5−17.
5. Igartua, Ivan: Loss of gender and language contact, University of the Basque country,2019, p. 1-42.