Non-Human Nouns, Human Plurals

إنْسان

root: ء-ن-س / noun / definition: a human

---

I was thinking about the root of the word إنْسان (“human”)—how ء-ن-س is associated with friendliness and familiarity, and how even the dictionary knows that humanity can be lost and corrupted if you muddle its origin (see ء-س-ن).

And the humanness of language is very much what my PhD thesis is about. I’m looking at how we can understand someone’s subconscious perceptions and hopes through something as intentional as literature.

It’s one of those topics that your own humanness gets entangled in, and I wonder if I can get through this chapter without a full-on sob session. Last night, writing about Khaled Khalifa in the introduction, I was somewhere between typing hands, a too-bright screen, cloudy lenses, and teary eyes.

Maybe analysing just confuses the concept of humanity, but maybe that’s another story. Right now, we’re looking at a different understanding of humanness: humanness in relation to grammar.

We know that human nouns (i.e. words referring to people) and non-human nouns (words referring to concrete or abstract things, other than people) in Arabic behave differently. One way they do so is in terms of how they form plurals.

Non-human nouns usually form broken plurals (where the letters/vowels in a word shift slightly) or take the sound feminine plural ending (ـات).

We’re told when we start learning Arabic that non-human nouns never take the sound masculine plural ending (either ـون or ـين, depending on the word’s grammatical role). And this, for the most part, is true.

But there are some exceptions: some non-human nouns do, in fact, take the sound masculine plural ending.

Someone raised this point in a comment on the post Exploring Time in the Arabic Dictionary: Is سنة Longer than عام?, where I’d mentioned that one plural form of the noun سَنة (“year”) is سِنين.

But سِنين wasn’t originally a fixed-form plural as we often hear it nowadays. It was variable: being سِنون in subject case, and سِنين in the oblique case.

And this isn’t the only example!

Look at these nouns and their case-sensitive plural forms:

• عالَم (“world”): عالَمون، عالَمين; note that these case-sensitive plurals refer to “inhabitants of the worlds” (see an example from the Qur’an), whereas the broken plural عَوالِم simply refers to “worlds”

• أَرْض (“earth”, “land”): أَرْضون، أرْضين; sometimes pronounced أَرَضون، أَرَضين (I personally like looking into Lane’s Lexicon when it comes to plural usage, it’s very detailed)

• عِلِّيّ (this is a possible singular form, grammarians say this word may only exist in its plural form): عِلِّيّون، عِلِّيّين, meaning “the uppermost heaven” or “loftiest heights” (both its plural forms are mentioned here in the Qur’an)

• أَهْل (“family”): أَهْلون، أَهْلين; these case-sensitive plurals mean “members of the family”, the broken plural أَهالٍ also exists

The list, technically, goes on. We have the word داهِرون/داهِرين used in the phrase دَهْر الدّاهِرين (“for ever and ever”) and similarly, آبِدون/آبِدين in أَبَد الآبِدين (with the same meaning).

Then, we’re probably familiar with the tens: عِشرون، عِشرين (“twenty”), ثَلاثون/ثَلاثين (“thirty”), etc.

And finally, we have words like أولون، أولين (sometimes as أُلون، أُلين) meaning “those who have/possess (a certain trait)”. We often see these plural forms in the إضافة (possessive construction) where—like other sound masculine plurals—they lose their final ن when they’re the non-final word in the construction.

So we might see phrases like أولو الأمر (“leaders”, lit.: “those who have command”). The plural ذَوُون works similarly, but I think we can explore these more deeply another time. What do you think?

See you soon, في أمان الله.

---

---

If you’d like to receive email notifications whenever a new post is published on The Arabic Pages, enter your email below and click “Subscribe”: