who decides whether French nouns are masculine or feminine?

[seethesuninwintertime]

I know people say it's random except for people and animals but it's not is it? Someone somewhere - may Louis the something - must have decided for once and for all that breasts masculine and beards are feminine and made everyone else agree? And that people who switched it over were wrong.
Or does it follow what they were in Latin? In which case who in Rome decided?

i think we should be told.

I don't understand how 'la chemise' means shirt in French, surely it means blouse if it's feminine?

^ that BTW, was an actual question from someone in my French class 30 years ago - I've never forgotten it 🤦

I also wonder about how silent letters came about, such as psalm, knife etc.

topseyt I know that one. They are letters that used to be pronounced. So in Chaucer's time knight was like "ker-nik-ge-he-t".
I think.
I believe one of the accents in French (circumflex?) is only there to show (needlessly perhaps) that in previous centuries there was an s there.

The Académie française tries to decide but everyone ignores them for new words like le / la covid, where it's whichever one wins out in the street. My five-year-old is a native French speaker and never gets genders wrong, it's pretty impressive how they soak it up.

My Bristolian relatives who spoke proper Bristle back in the day would gender everything - cars were feminine IIRC - where did that come from?

Love this thread!
I have a (rusty) degree in french and Italian. I’d like to go back and murder my GCSE french teacher who used to give half a point in our vocabulary tests if we got the word right but not the gender. So I only ever learned the words, figuring I’d a 50/50 chance of getting the gender right anyway! Boy I regretted it later! (Haha, accidentally did a joke using boy for this thread!!)

When I lived in France and Italy the locals used to say how weird it was when they looked at gender of nouns through a foreigner’s eyes!

Oh and on silent letters, in words like ghost it's because when printing came to England as a new technology before the language was stabilised (which came about largely as a result of print) the first printers were trained in the low countries and Germany and imported their own spelling and pronunciation into our written language.

"used to give half a point in our vocabulary tests if we got the word right but not the gender."

a novel motive for murder, we should alert the regional police forces.

isn't "ghost" a special case? some monk decided to put h in for a laugh when exporting said printed text?

... that women off Countdown put it in her book I think....

woman not women

It's not the Hittites' fault - the Anatolian branch split from Proto-Indo-European very early (when there was still an animarte-inanimate distinction in noun classes) so wouldn't have had any influence on the development of later IE languages.

allegatifac.unipv.it/silvialuraghi/Gender%20FoL.pdf This is long and thorough - I am mid-way through now!

With so many European languages having the masculine and feminine nouns, does anyone know why English doesn't?

@Greasyjane

This is what entirely put/s me off learning foreign languages. It just seems an insurmountable task to me to remember them all!

The earlier you learn them the better and it just becomes part of the word! I’m absolutely rock solid on the gender of French vocab I learned as a kid; stuff I learned as an adult is ropier but the more I use it the more it’s just a part of the word.

I find German so so difficult though with the three genders and fewer cues as to which is which. And because I only started in adulthood. At least French gives you a clue about 80% of the time by chucking an ‘e’ on the end.

@Twinstudy we don't get genders wrong but we do mix up verb conjugations when they sound the same. There was a famous murder case twenty years where the victim wrote "Omar m'a tuer" [Omar killed me, should be m'a tué but sounds the same] in her own blood and it all hinged on whether she would have made that grammar mistake or not.

In French if the word is feminine it probably ends in an e. Pretty useful rule from my French teacher.

It is suspect as to why words are masc or fem though, une catastrophe for example. Strikes me as blokes making the rules! Like when would that ever happen eh

"When Hittite was deciphered at the beginning of the twentieth century its two-gender system, with no unambiguous traces of feminine, even in pronouns, raised more questions than it helped answer. For several decides Hittologists, and consequently Indo-Europeanists, were divded into proponents of the Schwundhypothese and of the opposite Herkunfthypothese"

well that clears it all up nicely.

itssquidstella when you have understood it please will you come back and tell us?

@KeflavikAirport

The Académie française tries to decide but everyone ignores them for new words like le / la covid, where it's whichever one wins out in the street. My five-year-old is a native French speaker and never gets genders wrong, it's pretty impressive how they soak it up.

It is indeed.

I think the youngsters simply learn/absorb the nouns as an entity, e.g. “une voiture,” they don’t learn “voiture” and then think “ah, what’s the gender”?…

Wish I could do that.

Fascinating thread! I'd always vaguely assumed Romance languages followed Latin.

@KeflavikAirport That sounds like the plot of a thriller!

Fascinating thread - I love this stuff.

Aeons since A level but I can still remember some of the rules of German nouns - those ending in heit, keit, schaft and ung are feminine - aren’t they?

But I never understood why ‘girl’ (das Madchen, please imagine the umlaut) is neuter.

Off at a bit of a linguistic tangent, a Swedish friend’s son came to stay after he got a job in London. Having never met him, I had to meet him at Heathrow, with a placard - surname is Aker, with a little circle thing over the A.
I asked him later whether it meant anything in Swedish.
Yes, it means ‘field’.

So being me, I immediately thought of ‘acre’, which according to my big fat Oxford dictionary originally meant (in Anglo Saxon) the amount of land that could be ploughed by two oxen in a day.
The good old Oxford went on to say that the word (meaning much the same) goes back, with not too much in the way of changes, through Latin and ancient Greek, to Sanskrit.

I have tried to find an official linguistic connection between ‘gruesome’ and the German ‘grausam’ (cruel), and the Russian ‘Grozny’ , as in Ivan Grozny (Ivan the Terrible).
No luck but I can’t help thinking that they must come from the same ancestral root.

Old English had three genders but they fell out of use.

seems like the Academy hasn't decided about covid yet... (try the search box then compare to "table" or another French word you know)

www.academie-francaise.fr/

Shall we poser un question en francais to them?

One theory is that gender arises through the use of demonstratives (this, that) which would be used to specify the gender of a noun (at this point lacking a gender marker) being referred to. Over time, the demonstrative gets stuck to the end of a noun and interpreted as part of the word itself. So let's say the word for 'this female' is 'ha' and the word for child is 'puell'. Eventually, the words merge and you get 'puellha' > puella. Now any noun than ends with an -a is classified as belonging to the same category as puella, and therefore as being feminine (because a girl is clearly feminine).

Another theory (which the author proposes) is that PIE only distinguished between animate and inanimate. Inanimate eventually became neuter; the animate class of nouns naturally began to distinguish between male things and female ones, following a similar pattern of suffixing a marker to indicate whether the noun referred to male or female. She proposes that h2 (a laryngeal) was the feminine marker, but this was also the ending for some neuter nouns. Those neuter nouns then got reinterpreted as feminine, so even though the things referred to weren't feminine by nature, they began to be treated as such grammatically.