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.

That's how I was taught to learn vocab in languages with genders - so "la table" or "une accusation" (because l' is unhelpful).

Also some endings are always one or the other (tion = feminine, eau (but not on its own) = masculine). Water swaps as it goes from stream le ruisseau to river la rivière to le fleuve to la mer etc.

Love that kind of stuff!

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER mädchen is neuter because the diminutive suffix -chen is feminine. The article I linked above says that in PIE, words for children are almost always neuter because their sex is irrelevant until they're of an age to procreate.

-Chen is neuter, sorry!

Fascinating thread, thanks OP!

I saw this in the Times in May 2020 which you might all like.

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER
Mädchen is neuter because it is a diminutive (-chen).

Latin has 3 genders: féminine, masculine and neutral. In Latin based languages (French, Spanish, Italian etc.) the masculine and féminine words are the same in all languages, the neutral words vary.
Most modern imported words are masculin but the académie française does have the last say.
Children occasionally get words which start with à vowel wrong so might say "un école" because they have heard "mon ecole" but it doesn't last long. They wouldn't deliberately use the wrong gender because it is not funny.
Usage can be quite subtile. You say "une brebis" when you mean the animal (a ewe) but "le brebis" when talking about cheese because it is "le fromage".
Occasionally the same word has 2 genders but they mean different things: une mousse (= mousse) un mousse (= à cabin boy).

and a handful of words are masculine in the singular and feminine in the plural.

[quote Prokupatuscrakedatus]@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER
Mädchen is neuter because it is a diminutive (-chen).[/quote]
But so is Madel (girl, pls imagine the umlaut)!

I love how some people can see it's a mindblowingly bonkers question whereas other people take comfort in knowing microrules.

I think most of us do a bit of both because the former makes your head explode.

@GETTINGLIKEMYMOTHER but children don't need gender because their sex is irrelevant, so in Proto-Indo-European they are neuter by default.

@magicstar1, Irish isn't like French except for the gendered nouns.

All the nouns change form according to case and number too, in Irish. There is lenition and elipsis. It's more like Latin.

There are regular and irregular nouns, in addition, which complicates everything.

I just remember having “Une baguette” shouted at me in France when I’d requested “Un baguette”.

I didn’t know so guessed the thing shaped like a big penis would be masculine. Turns out it’s feminine 🤷

A much more useful question is are there any French words where the masculine version has a completely different meaning to the feminine.

Apparently so few as to not really matter.

Which begs the question why bother

I think the -el at the end of Mädel is a (regional?) diminutive as well, hence the neutral.

@DGRossetti

A much more useful question is are there any French words where the masculine version has a completely different meaning to the feminine.

Apparently so few as to not really matter.

Which begs the question why bother

Sticks neck out..one example..

Le Tour….roughly speaking “around”, as in “Le Tour de France”

La Tour….a tower.

Yes, I teach French, and I tell people don't learn "pomme" means apple, learn "une pomme" means an apple. Then it's part of what you learn in one go rather than learning a word and separately remembering its gender. And if you always say une pomme, un pomme will eventually sound wrong to you, which is how French children get it right, they've always heard it that way.

Very soon we will have words that are 'trans gender', on a Wednesday that baguette will identify as male and be un baguette! Now that really will put the cat amongst the pigeons and runs away.......

le manche / la manche, le poste / la poste, le moule / la moule...

there's a big debate ATM about inclusive writing and the new gender-neutral pronoun iel, actually.

@Shortpoet

I just remember having “Une baguette” shouted at me in France when I’d requested “Un baguette”.

I didn’t know so guessed the thing shaped like a big penis would be masculine. Turns out it’s feminine 🤷

🤣

I'm enjoying this thread.

@notimagain
"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”?…"
You've hit the nail on the head. This is the correct way to learn French and indeed any language with feminine and masculine (and sometimes neuter, too) nouns.

French books for babies and toddlers (the kind with pictures and vocab in, rather than story books) always have the article alongside the noun.

I'm fluent in French and have been for years. But I'm not a native speaker, and I still get it wrong sometimes. It's very annoying.

I have just discussed the covid debate with DH (who's French). He says officially it's la covid but he says le covid because he thinks that's what it should be I agree with him actually. Virus is masculine (le virus). However, flu and illness are feminine (la grippe, la maladie).

i think we should be told.

😂😂😂

When French people are doing piss-take imitations of tourists, do they deliberately get the feminine/masculine forms wrong? I bet they do

When doing grammar in my native language children learn to differentiate (masculine,feminine and neutral) by "counting" as numerals are gendered too and the plural version gives a hint too depending on the ending.

One (feminine) table
Two (feminine) tables

Feminine

One(masc) lion
Two(masc) lions

Masc

One (masc) sky
Two(feminine) skies

Neutral

@Muttly

We had a Spanish person, A Russian person who spoke fluent German as well and a French person at a party one night and they were comparing masculine, feminine nouns and the vast majority were the same in all of the languages so Louis the whatsit was pretty busy back in the day.

Not my experience, and I speak three of those languages.

Gender in a language is a category. If you have 3 (he, she, it in English or он, она, оно in Russian) then everything in the language has to fit in one of those 3.

It's similar to number (another language category). In English you have singular (one) and plural (more than one). All nouns have to be either or the other. It's the way the language works - you need to "remember" if you are talking about "one" or "more than one" and choose the right word (dog or dogs for example). Because it's your language it's natural and no effort. Other languages have no distinction between singular or plural, or you have to use specific words for 2, 3 and 4.

With gender, when the things you are talking about refer to obvious males or females it's simple (Spanish has abogado and abogada for a man-lawyer and a woman-lawyer). But a computer? A hand? A dog? An abstract concept? Not simple. Native Spanish speakers will tell you that words ending in -a are feminine, and anything else is masculine - learners know that's not always the case.

When new words appear (internet, Covid) there's often a period of hesitation between genders. Academies might have an opinion but they don't always have the last word.

Fascinating thread!

I still remember from my school German exchange trip, discussing this. I asked why a 'the' was even needed at all for proper nouns. The one that came up was 'Der McDonalds'. Bearing in mind that it's das restaurant or das cafe, if you do need a definite article for a named eating establishment, why on earth would it be 'der'? The only 'explanation' I was given was 'because it's DER McDonalds' (with an unspoken "Duuuuuhhh!!!").

I also find it a bit weird when we do have a few certain categories of words in English which traditionally sometimes take 'she' - mainly ships, cars, countries, the Church.... are there any more? And yet, although Britain (along with most countries) is always referred to as feminine (under this tradition), Germany - the 'fatherland', and sometimes Russia, is occasionally called 'he' ?!?!?!?!?!

I would also like to know if non-English-speaking countries are seeing the same thing that we are now, with some people rejecting and changing traditional genders to refer to themselves? Is it considered quite as 'loaded' to 'accept' the 'baggage' of the feminine mantle of she, if you don't consider yourself fully/at all 'female' when half the household objects around you are also apparently randomly referred to as 'she' as well?