Template talk:ar-numeral

The citation form of Arabic numerals is feminine, but this template takes masculine as the citation form

see title عُثمان (talk) 20:32, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@عُثمان: I don’t know what you are talking about. The citation form of Arabic numerals are feminine forms with masculine meaning, so your edits giving their meaning as “feminine” are incorrect. Fay Freak (talk) 21:05, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

What do you mean by "meaning"? Gender is grammatical in function in this context, numerals don't have semantic gender. عُثمان (talk) 21:10, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@عُثمان: The grammatical function of the feminine numerals is to agree with masculine plurals and vice versa, so that’s their meaning which we gloss. The webpages you have posted do not support your claims of how we should present our entries and are botted. Read an Arabic grammar, you should know make claims about properties of terms without thorough acquaintance with the language as reflected its grammar books—I do know the Arabic grammars, your exceptional link posts are irrelevant and again does not support you as they say e.g. تِسْعَة (tisʕa) is of feminine shape (صِيغَة (ṣīḡa)) which is correct but still does not mean we have to call it “feminine form” as it agrees with masculines so is grammatically, id est gender-wise masculine (as grammatical gender is defined by the agreement of an اِسْم (ism)), only morphologically feminine. So go revert your edits. Fay Freak (talk) 22:23, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

These links are not exceptional, that is a lexicographic database of Arabic forms and grammatical features that are the same as those found in other sources. That is not how the grammar works, just because these numerals have reverse polarity with respect to grammatical gender does not mean they have a gendered meaning. If we applied this logic everywhere it would render marking the gender meaningless. In Punjabi for example, we would use the masculine forms of words to describe female relatives. This does not mean that those words are feminine in meaning - it means female relatives require masculine words and nothing more.

If you can provide a specific source to an Arabic grammar that models this in the way you are describing, then we will have something to talk about. Otherwise, this is not something I see reflected in any sources and it reduces Wiktionary's credibility. عُثمان (talk) 22:40, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

Preferably sources in Arabic, like the ones I provided, I should add. --عُثمان (talk) 22:43, 16 November 2022 (UTC)

@عُثمان: Your argument is invalid. It is irrelevant whether gender is marked as it does not need to be marked at all morphologically. Gender is agreement. Therefore تِسْعَة (tisʕa) is of masculine gender, which we have noted in the sense line (which can also merely grammatical information, sometimes exclusively, as for synsemantics). The same you can derive from w:Polarity of gender: “the numeral (ten) is masculine whereas the noun (girls) is feminine.” Apparently you do not understand Punjabi grammar either. If female relative nouns have feminine gender then numeral adjectives agreeing with them are necessarily of feminine gender otherwise we cannot speak of “agreement”.

It could only be otherwise if the Arabic numerals are actually not even numeral adjectives but a noun phrase adjoining another noun, as for instance 3–9 require genitive plural but أَلْف (ʔalf) and مِئَة (miʔa) genitive singular and between 3–9 and 100 accusative singular, but there are indications against this, رِجَالٌ ثَمَانِيَةٌ (rijālun ṯamāniyatun) is also correct (or is this apposition? One could think so because of the little frequency of such construction, but Fischer, Wolfdietrich (2006) Grammatik des Klassischen Arabisch (in German), 4^th edition, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, →ISBN, page 72 § 129 speaks of “attributive” use, which wording excludes this, and Ewald, Georg Heinrich August (1833) Grammatica critica linguae arabicae, cum brevi metrorum doctrina‎^[1] (in Latin), volume 2, Leipzig: Libraria Hahniana, page 97 § 602 specifically calls them adjectives postposed as if in apposition) and the article ال (al-) can come in either or both positions.

Only “als Abstraktzahlen”, where the forms with ـَةٌ (-atun) are used Fischer seems to assume a noun or even a proper noun due to their diptotic inflexion. Yet there is no mention of these numerals having a gender—you would not need a usage example where سِتَّة (sitta) or another of these numerals has a verb as a predicate, like “nine scares me”, but this is probably just elliptical so indeed the predicate verb has to take the gender of the non-numeral noun, and in such fashion “als Konkretzahlen” we have the example كَانَ فِي الْمَدِينَةِ تِسْعَةٌ رَهْطٍ (kāna fī l-madīnati tisʕatun rahṭin, “There was nine [scilicet mandem] of the tribe in the city”), example taken from Ewald but actually in the Qurʾān 27:48—a standalone feminine-form numeral being invoked by a masculine-gender, masculine-form predicate verb. This also follows from the general rule that the default gender in Arabic is masculine, so the same holds true even though the default forms of numerals are feminine. But even “als Abstraktzahlen” the gender would, as humans learn to think abstractly from the concrete, by extension only come from رَقْم m (raqm), so must be masculine for all numerals as nouns in the abstractest senses; I am sure that in German we say femininely “die Eins, die Zwei …” from Zahl f.

Going further then one may doubt why there is need to assume genders for the numerals in general; Latin numerals also have special inflection behaviour and are not given any gender by Wiktionary, e.g. decem. Fay Freak (talk) 00:20, 17 November 2022 (UTC)

Well I waited for @Fenakhay to revert his inconsistent edits if not Osman himself is going to, as apparently due to belief perseverance he cannot be convinced by argument but by the impression of there being one man more than him gainsaying his finding. Fay Freak (talk) 01:45, 20 November 2022 (UTC)

Numeral adjectives in Punjabi only decline for gender as ordinals, and ordinals typically would not be used to describe people. The phenomenon I am referring to is more of a feature of genetive constructions and participle forms. I do not really understand what your argument here is. Gender polarity is a manifestation of agreement; agreement is descriptive not prescriptive.

The purpose of the gender indication, as far as I am aware, is to disambiguate the form of the lemma used as the headword. The meaning(s) do not have to be related. I have not seen an analysis of grammar which asserts that the grammatical gender has to do with

The utility of analysing adjective "9" as having polar agreement is that it allows us to determine that "19" is a noun formed as a genetive construction with "10" as the head. Only 1 and 2 are adjectives, 3 and above are nouns according to the Arabic language sources I have seen. (Per Birzeit University's model عدد اِسم.) The wording "attributive use" from Fischer does not preclude their status as nouns, as they can function as nominal attributes. Historically, many grammarians did not even consider adjectives as a separate category from nouns for this reason.

That Latin page looks incorrect if what you are saying about its inflections is true as it says it is indeclinable. عُثمان (talk) 21:07, 20 November 2022 (UTC)