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.

Actually, the Church as 'she' does makes sense - if considered as 'the bride of Christ' - but all the rest?!?!

Native Spanish speakers will tell you that words ending in -a are feminine, and anything else is masculine

You mean in the same way that any female Smurf will helpfully have a name ending in 'ette', but then all the rest will be male/masculine?!

All nouns have to be either or the other

No because you have uncountable nouns in English. One cake, two cakes > countable, some cake, some soap, some bread > uncountable

@JKDinomum

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.

Great tip for language learning.😀 That’s the way I was taught French and German vocabulary. The gender + noun still stick with me many years later . ... well , more or less !

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll French feminists reject the generic masculine and use various devices to make women more visible in language, so you might choose to write les professionnel.les , professionnel being masculine and professionnelle being feminine.

Love this thread! Found a great article that seems to address / reflect many of the ideas here: the (at times tenuous) link back to Latin, the way that children absorb gender assignment in language and how it ‘works’ in non-indo-European languages. Thank you for this, OP!

antigonejournal.com/2021/10/gender-in-latin-and-beyond/

Ooh, interesting - thanks, KeflavikAirport.

I suppose there isn't any 'gender neutral' version of 'they', is there, as you'd have to choose 'the females' or 'the group containing at least one male'. I suppose some might just opt for 'on', might they?

Actually, 'les professionnel.les' sounds very like the modern principle in German, where they will usually write e.g. 'SchulerInnen' - to acknowledge that not all of the school children are (necessarily) boys.

some people are using iel / iels as a new gender-neutral pronoun. It's just made it into the dictionary in the last few days and some people are up in arms against "le wokisme"

@WeBuiltThisBuffetOnSausageRoll

Native Spanish speakers will tell you that words ending in -a are feminine, and anything else is masculine

You mean in the same way that any female Smurf will helpfully have a name ending in 'ette', but then all the rest will be male/masculine?!

No. As in, the way it was inherited from Latin and carries no particular baggage. Agua (water) = feminine Rio (river) = masculine Mar (sea) = can be both. Usually masculine but it's a popular girls name. No hangups attached to it. The beef is with modern words that can take two genders.

yep same idea as in German.

Oh god, yes I wonder this too about Spanish which I am currently attempting to learn! My tutor must get so fed up of me constantly getting them wrong. And then having to work out if something is masculine or feminine depending on who owns the item, is the item m or f and if so then you can disregard the sex of the person who's item it is .... are there men present or just women.... kill me now!

I also thought I'd nailed it noticing a pattern of words ending with 'a' being feminine. Then my tutor reeled off a list of exceptions to the rule. And don't get me started on why beard is feminine - la barba. I know English will have its difficulties for a learner but at least we don't have to deal with the m/f!

I have always always wondered this since high school ... in my 50s now !!! A French table is feminine, but in German it's masculine ... my head was frazzled I dropped languages like a hot coal !!!

@KeflavikAirport

All nouns have to be either or the other

No because you have uncountable nouns in English. One cake, two cakes > countable, some cake, some soap, some bread > uncountable

All those nouns are either in the singular or the plural.

The actual item might be countable or uncountable or an alien from outer space. The words have to be in the singular or the plural. Cake or cakes.

The actual item might be a tree or a bridge or nuclear fusion. If you're speaking about it in a language, it's got to fit into the rules of that language.

There are even adult native speakers in French who have to correct themselves over masculine and feminine, you hear it all the time on TV.

You just learn the gender as part of the word, so it's not that difficult.
eg, in French, you learn that "house" is "la maison" not "maison", so eventually "le maison" just sounds wrong.

I hate when they don't agree with themselves.

In Italian if it ends in a it's a girl and goes with la. La donna. If it's male and it ends in o it's il. Il uomo. Then there's la radio and il cinema. FFS. WHY?

@SoHappyToBeAMum great article, thanks for sharing!

@MrsTerryPratchett cinema is masculine because nouns ending -ma are often loans or derived from Ancient Greek, where nouns ending -μα are neuter. There is no true neuter in Italian or Spanish (where the same rules about nouns in -ma being masculine applies), so nouns which were originally neuter in Latin and, in this case, Greek, are assigned to the masculine gender instead.

@MythicalBiologicalFennel OK I see what you mean :-)

I think radio is short for radiotelégraph, and the final part of that word (it's usually the final part of a compound word which supplies the gender) is from Greek γραφή (graphē), which is feminine.

[quote itssquidstella]@MrsTerryPratchett cinema is masculine because nouns ending -ma are often loans or derived from Ancient Greek, where nouns ending -μα are neuter. There is no true neuter in Italian or Spanish (where the same rules about nouns in -ma being masculine applies), so nouns which were originally neuter in Latin and, in this case, Greek, are assigned to the masculine gender instead.[/quote]
And this ladies and gentlemen and why I love Mumsnet.

There's always some genius who knows the answer to things.

I won't be annoyed con il cinema ma sono proprio arrabiatta con la radio.

I am learning Spanish at the moment and asked if new pronouns have been made for non binary people. Apparently there is el non-binario and la non-binaria as there is no neutral in Spanish.

Example from twitter

Agua (water) = feminine

Oh my god, the most mind-boggling thing I ever learned was that whilst "agua" is feminine in Spanish, it takes the masculine definite article el because it begins with a tonic A. Just as I'd gotten my head around that I then learnt that in actual fact el in this case is not actually the masculine article because it comes from a shortening of the same latin feminine article ILLA that la comes from, but if you say it quickly with any word starting with a tonic A, it naturally shortens to EL.

So EL is actually a feminine article Now, that's proper trans.