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I found a reference to a Toughedah Mitchell, born in 1930 and since deceased, on a South African site. No indication of gender! I've never seen anything like it before, and would gladly assume it's a typo or a transcription error - but, for what? Can anyone clarify?
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I found a couple of younger people named Toughedah, including a South African researcher. It appears to be feminine. It seems to end in a "-geeda" sound as I saw someone refer to a Toughedah as Geeda. There seem to be several spellings of this name, the more popular being Tougeedah, as well as variations of both without the final "h". All the people with this name who had their location visible on social media were South African. Judging by some research papers I came across that were about the Muslim community in SA (they mentioned "Die boek van Tougeed" published in 1890) I'm guessing it's a mostly Muslim name. I have no leads on the name's origin, though.
ETA There's also the spelling Taugeeda which leads me to make a huugeeee reach and guess that maybe it comes from Tauheed (Tawhid). I'm basing this entirely on the fact that there's a Cyrillic letter that used to be transcribed as either "h" or "g" and the fact that in Hebrew, which is a semitic language like Arabic, there's a deep gurgling "h" sound that could conceivably be represented as "g". I don't know but it's what my googling led me to.
ETA There's also the spelling Taugeeda which leads me to make a huugeeee reach and guess that maybe it comes from Tauheed (Tawhid). I'm basing this entirely on the fact that there's a Cyrillic letter that used to be transcribed as either "h" or "g" and the fact that in Hebrew, which is a semitic language like Arabic, there's a deep gurgling "h" sound that could conceivably be represented as "g". I don't know but it's what my googling led me to.
This message was edited 7/5/2020, 8:43 AM
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From her photo, Ms Jacobs (the UCT researcher) could well be part of a largely Muslim community. To your knowledge, though, are Arabic names routinely feminised by adding an -a or -ah? Some of them do end in -a, but is that the same thing?
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It seems to be common enough. From the top of my head to mind come: Jamil/Jamila, Hamid/Hamida, Hassan/Hassanah, Karim/Karima, Rashid/Rashida, Samir/Samira. I think when I was looking through some Arabic names a while ago this seemed like a popular thing.
I found this about Arabic nouns in general (from A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic
By Karin C. Ryding):
"In most cases, taa' marbuuTa (pronounced -ah or -a in pause form) is a marker of feminine gender. [...] The masculine singular is a base or unmarked form, and the feminine singular is marked by the presence of taa' marbuuTa."
I found this about Arabic nouns in general (from A Reference Grammar of Modern Standard Arabic
By Karin C. Ryding):
"In most cases, taa' marbuuTa (pronounced -ah or -a in pause form) is a marker of feminine gender. [...] The masculine singular is a base or unmarked form, and the feminine singular is marked by the presence of taa' marbuuTa."
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