Gender issues for a simple sentence

[smittybroham]

Hello everyone,

I've been attempting to translate my son's Dr. Seuss books into Arabic so I can read to him in both languages. I have two questions regarding this one simple sentence:

"This one has a little star."

This sentence refers to a male fish. I have seen the word for fish listed in dictionaries both in the masculine (samak) and feminine (samakah) forms.

Does the gender of the word for fish change if you're referring to a male fish? In other words, I'm trying to figure out if I should translate "This one has" as "Haadhaa al-samak 'ayn-du-haa" or "Haadhahee al-samakah 'ayn-du-hee".

Any help would be much appreciated.

[hearandobey]

hello,

yes samak (M) and samaka (F).

M: haadhaa al-samak anduhu...

f: hadhihi al-samaka andaha...

[hearandobey]

this one has (M): hadha anduhu

this one has (F): hadhihi andaha

[smittybroham]

Awesome. Thanks for your quick response. Here's a follow up question ... what if you have a word like sun (shems) that only has one gender, but the sun was a male character in a story? Would you conjugate in the feminine because the word is feminine, or masculine because the gender of the sun in the story is masculine?

[hearandobey]

hmmh, well if i were to say the sun is shining, i would say shining in a feminine way: mushriqa (the a of a feminine "doer"). because it is "generally" a feminine word.

i don't really know what to do in your case, i'm affraid. i can assure you though that there are men in the arab world that have the name shams. so surely their families will say "shams is reading" or doing whatever (the verb) in a masculine way.

hope that helps.

[smittybroham]

Yeah, that helps. Wasn't aware anyone was named Shams, but it makes sense if a man was named Shams, you'd have to conjugate for masculine even if the word is feminine. Thanks again!