Re: French gender

En réponse à "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>:

>
> 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.
>
Normal, it's an adjective: "commode": practical. People say that we call a
piece of furniture "la commode" because it is "commode" :)) . But I think it's
only folk etymology (or maybe not, you never know :) ).

> >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.
>
True, I forgot this one. And "délice" can be one too, though it's now found in
masculine even in plural.

>
> 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".
>
Not sure. If I cut those words into stem+ending, I get uni-on (from the
verb "unir": to unite), opin-ion (probably related to "opiner": to agree, not
much used anymore) and communi-on (from "communier", sorry, it's not a compound
of "union"). In this, only the second one is a real exception to the rule that
words in -ion are masculine. The other two are also exceptions, but to the rule
that -on words are masculine. The point of the rule is that you have to take
the true ending. "cation" is not really an exception to the rule that -tion
words are feminine, since it breaks down in cat-ion and not in ca-tion. You
have to know etymology too in fact (or at least know some related words to know
where to break the morphemes. For instance, you know that "communication" has a
true -tion ending, because of the verb "communiquer". Another example
is "vision", which has a true -sion ending since its verb is "voir", and
not "viser" (both exist).

I know, this is quite difficult. French makes sense, but only when you know a
little bit of etymology or a large bit of vocabulary :) .

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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