5.2 Gender — is it a "he" word or a "she" word?

5 · Nouns — naming things, and making them plural · a plain-language guide to Assyrian (Sureth) grammar

Every noun is either masculine ("he") or feminine ("she"), and it matters because the verb, the adjective, and the copula all have to agree with it (a woman ila "she is," a man ile "he is"; see Ch. 3). Two rules and one warning:

Rule 1 — anything ending in -ta is feminine. No exceptions worth worrying about. bakhta "woman," brata "girl," shabta "week," taverta "cow" — all feminine.

Rule 2 — most words ending in -a are masculine. baba "father," beta "house," malka "king," tora "ox," ilana "tree," susa "horse" — all masculine.

The warning — a cluster of common -a words are feminine anyway. These you simply memorize, and helpfully they fall into rough groups:

Body parts that are feminine: akla "leg/foot," ida "hand," kisa "belly," kana "horn," ayna "eye," rukha "spirit/breath." (But risha "head," lebba "heart," nakhira "nose" stay masculine — so it's not all body parts.)

Places and countries: mata "village," ara "land/ground," yama "sea," khakla "field," shmayya "sky," and country names like Iran, Amerka.

Small animals: nuyna "fish," yona "dove," debba "bear," kalma "louse," buma "owl."

And a scatter of others with no logic: urkha "road," sepa "sword," melkha "salt," bushala "stew," tina "fig," shemsha "sun."

Shortcut for guessing loanwords. When a borrowed word comes in with no Assyrian -a/-ta hat (from Persian, Azeri, Turkish, Kurdish…), the default guess the language makes is feminine. Masculine gets assigned mostly to things that are long (a pipe, a whip, a skewer), flat (a table, a quilt), material/liquid (silk, tea, copper, poison), or big powerful animals (jackal, wild boar). Everything else — and most abstract borrowings — lands feminine. So a new "gadget" word you hear is a decent bet to be feminine.

Gender in action. You hear a noun's gender in the copula: masculine → ile "he/it is," feminine → ila "she/it is" (Ch. 3). Notice how two nouns with the same -a ending split apart:

malka ile — "it's a king" (masculine)
susa ile — "it's a horse" (masculine)
lebba ile — "it's a heart" (masculine, even though it's a body part)
ida ila — "it's a hand" (feminine body part → ila)
nuyna ila — "it's a fish" (feminine small animal → ila)
urkha ila — "it's a road" (feminine, no reason but memory)
bakhta ila / brata ila — "it's a woman / a girl" (both feminine)

The pattern to internalize: -ta words always take ila; -a words usually take ile, but the memorized feminine ones (ida, nuyna, urkha…) take ila.

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