Irregular plural nouns are always feminine, unless they refer to male humans where they can be masculine.

When irregular plurals refer to humans, they can be treated grammatically as plural nouns instead of singular. For example, one would say "these are the writers" instead of "this is the writers;" the latter is purer but less common, especially in modern Arabic. However, the declension of an irregular plural noun will not change even if it is treated as a plural — it will always have the endings of a singular noun.

When an irregular plural noun is treated as a plural (when it refers to humans), the gender of the noun will match the gender of its singular.

Since that nouns referring to female humans are usually pluralized through the feminine regular plural, irregular plurals referring to humans usually refer to male humans.

Irregular plurals are in fact a kind of collective nouns. They are semantically plural, but grammatically they are singular.

aulaad" is paucity broken plural, feminine, grammatically singular. It denotes progenies. On the contrary, "waladun" singular, masculine refers only a male progeny. Every word of Qur'aan is an un-substitutable pearl embedded at its place. Replacement of one word might distort the entire perception of the given text.Abdul Rahman

26th August, 2012

Can you explain, brother, how, according to your understanding, the plural "aulaad" denotes "progenies" both male and female, whereas the singular "walad" only refers to a male progeny?

The syntactical state of (some) collectives and double plurals?

رجل (masc. sing.) gives رجال (masc. plural) but we also have رجالات

رجالات is morphologically feminine so one might err and assume that it would be syntactically feminine too, despite the fact that it refers to 1) great men; 2) a large group of men. It ought to be masculine! Certainly Tabari uses it as masculine, and I assume he means (1) above:

فاغتصبه إياه فمشى عبد المطلب إلى رجالات قومه فسألهم النصرة على عمه

As a word, رجالاتwas discussed (here) but we never discussed its generally accepted syntactical state.

Some plurals might have been treated masculine by some classical writers but not by others and at times the same author used either gender for the same word in the same text! This might have been particularly so for non-rational beings. This too we discussed once at least,concerning the use of either gender for نحل by al-Jahiz (here).

In the same thread, Josh mentioned that some collectives of rational beings can also be either masculine or feminine and a link in the same thread gives other examples of rational collectives being treated as either feminine or masculine(here ) depending whether we are dealing with modern or classical usage!!

If رجالات was ever considered to be grammatically feminine, then we have an exception. One could still argue, however, that رجالات could conceptually be treated as شعوب , hence feminine!
 

Almost always all non-rational (i.e. human) plurals are syntactically feminine. But we also have these:

سِنَة (fem. sing.) has سَنوات (fem. plural) OR سِنونَ (masc. plural)!

Similarly,
أرض (fem. sing.) has أراض (fem. plural) OR أرضونَ (masc. plural)!

Now, I grant you that سِنونَ and أرضونَ are a lot less common but when used, I would assume, they'd be treated syntactically as masculine, i.e. سِنونَ کَثیِرونَ and not سِنونَ کَثیرَۃ (?)

Collective nouns are those which are used for the groups

(include many units of that noun BUT NOT ALL while "ألجنس "

talks about the whole class as a unit (without being units in

consideration).
 

"ألجنس " It is a noun called Generic Noun. It is that which has a singular that it shares with a singular noun. The generic noun is distinguished by the addition of feminine Ta or relative Ya.

irregular (broken) plural nouns are grammatically singular nouns that refer to plural units or to large amounts of uncountable objects.

A unique and important morpho-semantic feature of Arabic nouns is humanness, that is, whether or not they refer to human beings. This is a crucial grammatical point for predicting certain kind of plural formation and for purposes of agreement with other components of a phrase or clause. The grammatical criterion of humanness applies only to nouns in the plural.

Agreement: