Re: French gender

En réponse à James <Kvasir_postia@...>:

>
> > Feminine
> > -lle/-tte/-sse: la belle, la crevette, la fesse (hehe), la feuille
>
>      The joke about fesse, for those of you who were wondering, is
> that it means "buttock" or "spanking."
Only "buttock", spanking is "fessée", also a feminine word :) .

>      Now there's a difference between belle and feuille in that the -
> lle is pronounced [l] in belle but [j] in feuille. <lle> = [l] is
> definitely feminine, but is <lle> = [j] always so? Those words always
> annoyed me ;)
>
Always. [j] masculine is written <il>.

> > -é: la beauté, la fierté
>
> Better to say that -té is a feminine ending. -é preceded by other
> letters is usually masculine, e.g. aimé, tué, reglé. The feminine
> equivalent of the -é ending is of course -ée as in repartée.
>
"repartée"? Not a French word that I know. Or do you mean "répartie"? As for a
word in -ée, take "fessée" :)) .

>
> Yep, traditionally the word means buttock, but in colloquial
> french "la fesse" comes to mean "ass" as well.
>
More exactly, "ass" is "les fesses" in plural. In singular, "fesse" is also an
argot word for "porn": "film de fesse": "porn movie". Extremely argotic, used
only by people who drink beer at breakfast and never wash.

>
> There is no definite article to be place in front of a city name so
> you don't have to worry about the gender.
But you do use an article when you qualify the city name (usually put it after
the city name and before the adjective). In this case, all city names are
feminine (like "ville").

 But states, provinces,
> rivers, islands, mountains all have gender. and then there are those
> names that start with vowels and it doesn't matter what gender they
> are really... :o) (l'Ontario, l'Espagne, l'Italie)
>
> Feminine:
> -All countries ends with -e
> la France, la Chine, la Corée, la Nouvelle-Ecosse, la Californie, la
> Seine, la Corse
> exception: LE Mexique (there's at least one more exception out
> there... can anyone recall?)
Etymology, in Spanish "Méjico" is masculine. As for another exception, there
was "le Zaïre", but now that it renamed itself "République Démocratique du
Congo", it doesn't exist anymore :) . As for the reason for this exception,
it's because it was the name of a river (rivers can be masculine or feminine in
French, and there's no way to predict which one: "la Seine", but "le Rhône").
There must be a couple other exceptions out there. I used to know them by heart.

>
> Masculine:
> -All others
> le Canada, le Pakistan, le Singapour, le Québec, le Kentucky, le
> Mississippi, le Groenland
>
> and don't forget the plural accord...
> les Etats-Unis, les Pays-Bas, les Antilles, les Alpes, les Grands-Lacs
>
And the few ones which don't take an article, like Israël and Monaco (well,
technically it's a country :) ). They are all masculine as far as I can
remember.

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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