Re: French gender

Christophe wrote:

>There are even words that can be used in either gender (I can't
>think of any at the moment),
With or without a change in meaning? I could've sworn "le commode/la
commode" was a pair, but there's no "le commode" in the dictionary.
Oh well.

>or even words that change gender between singular
>and plural (the most well known being "amour", masculine in singular but
>feminine in plural - not that it's often used in plural in everyday
>talk :) -).
un orgue, des orgues (f.) was my first encounter.


In a separate post, he wrote:

>Sorry to disappoint you, but that's no exception. Only the -tion and -sion
>endings (coming from Latin -tio, -tionis and -sio,-sionis) are regularly
>feminine (the exceptions like "cation" come from the fact that the ending is
>not -tion, but -ion (reflected also in pronunciation)). All other -ion endings
>are regularly masculine.

Sorry, with "l'union", "l'opinion", and "la communion" (okay, it's a
compound), all feminine, I thought the regularity went the other way
on "-nion".

Kou

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