Hey Francophones - possibly offensive question. Beyond ending sounds, are there other rules of thumb for guessing gender of a word without knowing it? I may be imagining it, but I feel I can get pretty far imagining a sexist past society, e.g. large scary animals, new technology, important things often male. House stuff, small cute things often female.
@ZachWeinersmith The only rule is that there are no rules! Désolé :-)
PS: male: "le balai" (the broomstick), "le lave-vaisselle" (the dishwasher).
female: "la voiture" (the car, who would have thought), "la fusée" (the rocket, definitely new tech at some point)
@ZachWeinersmith I really don't feel there's a pattern. Panther is female but cougar is male (oh the irony). Chair is female, armchair is male, so is stool. A TV set is male, but the television program being aired on said TV set is female.
Even the final vowel is not a foolproof proxy, spoon is female and ending with r.
As a French native speaker, it's hard to go beyond what is known through timeless practice, but in there I really feel like there is no rule, just exceptions.
@ZachWeinersmith If this helps, in Spanish, which has a similar gender structure to French, the same happens and, if I'm not mistaken, it's 'cause imported words from English are genderless. Since they need to be assigned a gender when they enter Spanish, masculine is the one to go 'cause it evolved from the combination of both the masculine and neutral latin genders; as such, it's the inclusive gender by default for any set of words that aren't exclusively feminine, including genderless ones.
@ZachWeinersmith
No general rule that I know of. Sometimes two different words for the same object have two different genders. Like "le vélo" vs "la bicyclette".
Certainly as a girl learning French in elementary and high school, that was my cynical understanding.
The one thing that did intuitively take, however, was that nouns ending in -e are feminine. Aaaand now I live in Germany where that is absolutely not a valid assumption. Sigh.
(German is also pretty random about genderings - the only useful rule is that nounds ending in -ung, -heit or -keit are feminine.)
@ZachWeinersmith groups of words with similar endings tend to have the same grammatical gender but sorry for new learners it's not as simple as "words for girls" and "words for boys".
@ZachWeinersmith I don't think so as the gender of word comes mostly from latin declination with a lot of randomness involved. There is some rare instances of words changing gender because of sexism in the XVIIth like error becoming female.
@ZachWeinersmith there is a story going on about how some words gender was swapped because strong things should be male and delicate things should be female, on a suggestion from Richelieu. Hence some inconsistencies between word endings and gender.
@ZachWeinersmith no it's mostly mixed, without much global rules. Of course, case by case there's some historical/cultural/sexist reasons, but it's mostly just as we learn it
@ZachWeinersmith I'm not a linguist so my opinion may not be of any relevance but I can't think of any general rule or tendency about the words and their gender... There are lots of weird ones if you start looking, like "masculinity" ("la masculinité") being female in french 😁
That's not really weird, though? Abstractions will generally take feminine endings across IE languages, due to that being an initial use of the inanimate gender in old PIE.
So every French word that ends with -ité will be feminine. The semantics don't really matter.
@caffetiel@ZachWeinersmith I guess it's logic (As I said, I have absolutely no knowledge about language history 😅) but it seemed to me Zach's message was more about the relationship between the meaning of the word and its gender. On this subject, I find pretty funny that the word for males, "masculinité", is female 😁
@ZachWeinersmith The gender is (generally) the same in the various Romance languages. So if you speak Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or Romanian, you'll easily guess. If you speak English, you'll get it wrong and we'll laugh at you 😆
@ZachWeinersmith giraffes might not be as scary as elephant, but they are gendered female in french (contrary to elephants, and most big/scary animals), and i would guess they are actually pretty dangerous in the wild for humans.
edit: spiders are also "female", but they are dangerous in a different way than elephants, which is certainly fitting in a sexist analysis.
@ZachWeinersmith Mmmh, not sure. I'm pretty scared of bombs and it's "La bombe". On the other hand "Le chaton" (kitten) and most of those are cute until they rip your throat out
@ZachWeinersmith I don't know general rules, but I've noticed that most imported words are masculine. "le weekend, le hamburger, le weinersmith," etc. Not sure how your wife would feel about the last one.
@ZachWeinersmith@ovid i don’t know "la peur", "la mort", "la faim"… many consonants.
edit: oh, and for some reason, the academy had decided that it was "la covid", at least this is a recent decision whose rational can be looked up (i think it was because "la (maladie) covid"), but i think most people had intuited it as "le covid".
"Il a attrapé le/la covid" "he got covid", it’s really weird if i remove the adjective.
or "covid is airborn" -> "Le/La Covid est aérosol", again, dropping the adjective makes for incorrect french, i’m not a grammarian, but i think we always need an adjective to designate a common word as subject or object.
@tshirtman
Very interesting. I've noticed that some illnesses in English must be prefixed with articles (the flu, a cold, etc.), while others do not (cancer, diabetes, COVID, etc.). @ZachWeinersmith@ovid
@JamesDBartlett3@ZachWeinersmith@ovid funny example, actually, "a cold" can be translated as"froid", without an article "il a attrapé froid", maybe because froid is an adjective used as a substantive here, but again, i’m no grammarian, so walking on thin ice there.
@tshirtman
It gets even weirder in English. It's grammatically fine to say either, "you'll catch cold" or "you'll catch a cold," though the first one sounds a little antiquated. However, if we switch to past tense, then only "you caught a cold" is correct. If we said, "you caught cold," the follow-up question would be "Why were you chasing cold in the first place?" @ZachWeinersmith@ovid
@tshirtman@JamesDBartlett3@ZachWeinersmith Fun grammar nit: the first time I spoke to my mother-in-law in French, I tried to say that I was envious that she spoke (some) English without a strong accent.
Turns out there's a WHOPPING huge difference between "j'ai envie de toi" and "je t'envie". I still get those mixed up.
Can’t really explain why they have so different meanings though, in both it seems "te/toi" plays the same role, but it might be a peculiarity about how "envie" is used to mean two different things here, the first one implying desire, the other envy/jealousy.
@tshirtman@ovid@JamesDBartlett3 Vaguely similar in English - if you say "I WANT you" that's typically sexual whereas "I want YOU" or "I want you to..." it's not.
@ZachWeinersmith@tshirtman@ovid@JamesDBartlett3 But it bothered me as a child in Kenya when Brit teacher said bottle wanted a cap - sent me off into "who's alive and having feelings and who's not" thoughts
@flaccide@ovid@anneoneam@ZachWeinersmith@JamesDBartlett3 yes, but that’s indeed what Ovid meant, he wanted to use "envier", rather than "avoir envie", but the later being more common, i guess it was a more obvious (but wrong) translation from "i envy you".
@flaccide@ovid@tshirtman@ZachWeinersmith@JamesDBartlett3 if "envier" means "being jealous" and "avoir envie" means "to want", then I was spot on when I said those don't have the same meaning, right? I don't see your point...
@ovid@ZachWeinersmith yeah, i don’t consider the academy as a real authority, they have some influence, but french is what french people (well, and other francophones) speak, languages are not so easily controlled.
Any good baladodiffusion to recommend? 😆
(for non-french-speakers, it’s the made up word for "podcast", that nobody uses)
True that. Also, the great thing about speaking #French with a foreign accent: when I'm talking to a right-wing nutter over here, if I make reference to « Marine La Panne » instead of « Marine Le Pen », they can't tell if I'm mocking them or not.
@ZachWeinersmith@ovid My best guess is it's a "default" thing, much like how when forming a verb from a loanword, it's always using -er and never 2nd and 3rd group endings. There are exceptions when word endings match common feminine endings though, but even there it can vary between dialects. Quebec French says "la trampoline" because of the -ine bit, while European French uses "le trampoline" (though that's partly because of the Italian word it came from)
@ovid@ZachWeinersmith important but dangerous/bad things can be female, "la maladie", "la mort", "la colère", "la méchanceté", though it’s not a general thing, and maybe i’m just looking for such examples, i didn’t do stats on that 😅
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