Day 1818 (Tuesday) 31st May 2022

Huw was tired today after doing four hours of physical work yesterday and a not very good night’s sleep. He has a same day check-out, check-in tomorrow so we decided to have a lovely lazy day sunbathing and pottering around the flat. I’ve only got a Zoom lesson at 5.15 – 6.45 with the genius in Toulouse. We both did our Duolingo and I’ve dropped to 6th place in my league and Huw was at the top of his league, which made him very happy.

I haven’t written about the French language for a while so here goes. I found these articles on Quora Digest all about genders in French

Hillary Sibille – teacher of French, Spanish and English as a second language since 1979

How do French people know the masculinity or femininity of an object?

I think you’re asking how the French have word gender (we don’t say “masculinity” or “femininity”) memorised. It seems effortless, doesn’t it?

First of all, the French don’t see an object as masculine or male or feminine or female. It’s simply the word that has gender. That’s a hard concept for us English speakers to grasp. No French person thinks a table is a girl and paper is a boy.

There are a few easy rules you can learn:

Nouns that end in -té are feminine.

Nouns that end in -tion are feminine.

Nouns that end in -age are masculine. (Well, not la plage, so let’s say most of them.)

Nouns for grandmother, sister, aunt, etc. are feminine, and nouns for brother, father, etc. are masculine. Of course.

But that certainly doesn’t cover all the nouns in the language. The French know the gender because they’ve been using it all their lives. Now, here is something that we English speakers just know because we’ve been using it all our lives: verb use. For example, look at this sentence:

I study French since last year. It’s wrong, isn’t it? Do you know why? Maybe you do. Can you correct it? Yes: I’ve been studying French since last year. How did you know that? Because you know what sounds right. There is actually a rule about using the present perfect progressive with “since,” but we native speakers don’t need to know that rule. Just like French speakers don’t need to know rules about noun gender. (Unless you’re an English teacher.)

But someone learning English does need to learn that rule. And many non-natives make the mistake I wrote at the top of the previous paragraph, because it doesn’t come naturally to them. They make the mistake all the time. It’s a tipoff that they’re not native speakers.

So, the bottom line is: When you learn new words in French, if they’re nouns. just learn the gender right away. It’ll make things easier for you. And don’t worry if you make the occasional mistake. Everyone does.

Christine Moseley lives in France

How much do French people really care about using the correct masculine or feminine articles? How do they react if a non-native French speaker were to accidentally use the wrong article?

As a 12-year-old pupil at a convent school in the UK French gender differentiation was drummed into us by a story.

The teacher was a nun in an order which had a convent in Annecy. Our teacher was sent there to perfect her French, and so she began to think and pray in French. She told us that one day she was in chapel praying and said: Dieu, donnez-moi encore du foi s'il vous plaît. N.B. du is masculine.

The next day liver was on the table for lunch. She then realised that the translation of liver is le foie i.e. masculine.

Our teacher was embarrassed, God had done the best he could to answer the prayer.

What she had intended to say in her prayers was: Dieu, donnez-moi encore de la foi, s'il vous plaît. N. B. de la is feminine.

Had she got the gender right she would perhaps recieved the gift of more faith.

The moral of her tale was clear: Get the gender wrong and you risk total and utter misunderstanding which even God can't correct.

Simon Labrunie native French speaker

Why does French have feminine and masculine nouns?

Originally Answered: Why does French (among other languages) still use masculine and feminine nouns, despite the fact that this seems entirely pointless and irrational?

Edit: the question I originally answered was worded as: Why does French (among other languages) still use masculine and feminine nouns, despite the fact that this seems entirely pointless and irrational?

As it happens, this is the umpteenth iteration of this question. Here are two of its previous incarnations:

Are genders in French a superfluous complexity?
Who determined the gender of nouns in languages like French and German? How can a table be feminine in French and masculine in German? It has nothing to do with gender.

I hope I may convince you that your question, actually, means:

Why is French (among other languages) unlike English?

Well, the answer is… because it isn’t English.

Actually:

Pointless? Gender isn’t pointless. Gender means agreement, agreement means redundance, and redundance is a feature, not a bug. It helps to parse sentences by narrowing down the possible interpretations of pronouns, noun-adjective relationships… It also serves to distinguish between certain homophones (un livre is not the same as une livre). 

(parse /pɑːz/

verb

resolve (a sentence) into its component parts and describe their syntactic roles.

"I asked a couple of students to parse these sentences for me")

Irrational? You mean, not logically motivated? Well, it’s only partly true: in certain cases, the suffix of a noun tells the gender. Or arbitrary? Well, like pretty much everything in language. For instance, many usages of English phrasal verbs (look up, look out, look over, look through etc) look pretty arbitrary to foreign learners. So does the use of the gerund after certain verbs, but infinitive with to, or without to, after some others. (Gerunds and infinitives can replace a noun in a sentence. Gerund = the present participle (-ing) form of the verb, e.g., singing, dancing, running. Infinitive = to + the base form of the verb, e.g., to sing, to dance, to run.)

 The difference is that we usually don’t complain. Language is usage, and usage is… how people talk.
The only reason why some English speakers focus on gender is that they don’t have any equivalent in their language, so they refuse a priori to believe that it can be meaningful to other people, and demand an unnatural justification by “logic” or “rationality”, which they would never consider for other aspects of language. 

(A priori/ˌeɪ prʌɪˈɔːrʌɪ,ˌɑː prɪˈɔːri/ adjective relating to or denoting reasoning or knowledge which proceeds from theoretical deduction rather than from observation or experience.

"a priori assumptions about human nature"

Similar: theoretical

adverb

in a way based on theoretical deduction rather than empirical observation.

"sexuality may be a factor but it cannot be assumed a priori"

Similar: theoretically.)

“Still”? You mean, the withering away of gender is the natural, logical, evolution of language? Nope. It’s the way English (and a few others including Persian and Bengali) have developed, full stop. English isn’t the yardstick against which every other language should be measured. There are language families which never had gender as far as one can know or reconstruct (Turkic, Uralic, Austronesian, Chinese…) On the other hand, language families which developed gender or noun class systems (Indo-European, Afro-Asiatic, Bantu…) have generally kept them. There must be a reason. And actually there is: gender does a useful job.

Grammar lesson over – here are some cats to make us smile after the grammar.

Look at those eyes