نائبة الرئيس

here's something funny that came up with my arabic tutor last night: the word used for "deputy" in arabic is naa'ib (نائب). it's also the word used for "vice" in the term "vice president", or naa'ib al-ra'iis (نائب الرئيس)--deputy to the president.

arabic, like a lot of languages, is gendered. that is, there are masculine and feminine forms for words, particularly nouns and adjectives. to make a masculine word feminine, you add a feminine ending. the ending is an "a" sound followed by a letter that is either silent or pronounced like a "t", depending on how it is used grammatically.

so what happens to naa'ib if we have a vice president? applying the above rule would get us naa'iba(t) (نائبة). so if we had a female vice president she would be "naa'ibat ra'iis" (نائبة الرئيس). the problem is the word naa'iba(t) already has its own meaning. it means disaster or calamity. the word for "a female vice president" can also mean "disaster of a president".

obviously, the same unfortunate double meaning would occur with any female vice president, not just ones i don't like. i'm trying to figure out if that counts as a kind of de facto sexism. adding a feminine ending to a word doesn't always make that word more negative. if i think about it long enough, i could probably come up with an example of a word made more positive by adding a feminine ending. so it's not the case that arabic as a language automatically assumes that women doing things is a bad thing. i think the problem is that it never occurred to whoever coined this sense of the word "naa'ib" that there could be a female deputy, or vice president. that's a sexist assumption, but i'm not sure how far back this use of the word naa'ib was coined. whenever you have gendered words in a language, it will inevitably pick up the cultural assumptions of the people who use it.

that being said, it still is amusing to see headlines like this one. the headline was intended to announce mccain's choice of palin as his vice president but could be read as "the choosing of sarah palin is a disaster for mccain"