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Re: French gender

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Friday, October 12, 2001, 11:59
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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Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...>