Genders of Substantives
27. As the terminations not only of Adjectives but of Nouns under government in the Genitive Case, and also Participles and certain Tenses of the Verb, are affected by the Gender of the governing or qualified Substantives, it is evidently of great consequence, in order to speak or write Urdū correctly, that the Genders of the Nouns should be known.
28. A few rules and hints on the subject will, therefore, be useful to the learner.
(1) It need hardly be said that proper names, titles, and professions peculiar to males, are Masculine; and those peculiar to females, are Feminine; though even to this obvious rule, there are one or two exceptions. For instance, the word kabīla, meaning properly 'a tribe,' 'a family,' is often by a delicate euphony applied to 'a wife' in conversation, though it is a Masculine Noun. And several other Masculine words (such as ḵẖāndān 'a family') are similarly used instead of jorū 'a wife.'
(2) The Gender of a large number of Nouns depends on their termination and linguistic origin. Thus Hindī, or purely Indian, words ending in ā are nearly all Masculine in Urdū, though there are numerous exceptions in the Hindi dialect itself.
In Urdū, as well as Hindī, Indian Diminutives ending in iyā are Feminine, as chiriyā 'a bird,' dibiyā 'a small box,' and p,huṛiyā 'a small boil.'
(3) Nouns ending in ū or ō, and especially those in āo, are mostly Masculine. To this there are some half-dozen exceptions, as nāo 'a boat,' dāru 'liquor,' balū 'sand,' and rohū 'a sort of fish.' Also about a dozen Persian
