Re: French gender

En réponse à D Tse <exponent@...>:

> Just a question to all the Francophones on the list... is there any
> way to predict the gender of at least some words in French by their
> terminals, as you can in Italian, Spanish, etc?
>
> Imperative
>
To guess the gender of a noun in French depending on its ending, you must first
decide whether it has a common ending (which usually triggers the gender) or
not. Common endings can be:
- age: masculine,
- isme: masculine,
- iste: masculine (but there is some tendency to use those words in both
genders),
- eur: masculine,
- il: masculine,
- (t)é: feminine in words that mark qualities (beauté, gaité, amitié, etc...),
masculine otherwise (for instance for past participles, or words like député),
- ice: feminine,
- euse: feminine,
- esse: feminine,
- tion/sion: feminine (words in -ion with another consonnant are normally
masculine),
- ille: feminine (note that it's homophonous to masculine -il)

There are plenty of those endings, and you have to learn them by heart (as well
as the exceptions, like the "cation" - which is cat-ion and not ca-tion, and is
pronounced /katjO~/ instead of */kasjO~/. Etymology helps usually a lot :) -).
Note also that I didn't differentiate the case when <il> or <ille> marks /il/
and the case when they mark /j/. There is no difference when it comes to
gender. But note that they are two different kinds of endings which happen to
be written the same.

If the ending is not common, the rule of thumb is that a word ending in silent -
e is feminine, and others are masculine. Exceptions are due to etymology (like
poète).

Also, don't forget the meaning (homme may end in a silent -e, it's masculine,
due to its meaning).

And don't be ashamed of not knowing the gender of some French nouns, even
French people have difficulties with the gender of some words (like "après-
midi", which is masculine, like "midi", but you can find people saying it as
feminine. The reason seems to be that whereas "jour", "matin" and "soir" have
feminine counterparts noting duration: "journée", "matinée" and "soirée",
"après-midi" doesn't, it means both the moment and the duration. But when
people use it for duration, they tend to make it feminine like the other
durations). There are even words that can be used in either gender (I can't
think of any at the moment), 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 :) -).

Christophe.

http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr

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