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.

In French, it's un espace, unless you're talking about a space in typography, in which case it's une espace. Who TF knows why.

@dangerrabbit

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.

In Spanish pople have started using @ to include both sexes / cover both grammatical genders. In this case it would nonbinari@. I have no idea how one is mean to pronounce that though

@MythicalBiologicalFennel yes I have a lot of South and Central American friends who use @ (e.g. chic@s) as a gender neutral term, but I don't know how they say it - I’ve only seen it in writing!

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?

Transport is a theme here - trains (locomotives) are always 'she'. I wonder if it's because they were historically driven only by men.

Mention of countable nouns reminds me of my DFs permanent exasperation with "sheep" never understanding why it wasn't "sheeps" plural.

I have a vague memory some dialects reverse genders ?

@seethesuninwintertime

It's a bit like who decide there are 12 hours in a day (some bloke in Babylon?) which is equally random except we don't notice it because it is universal.

or is it? Did some people have, like 7 hours between sunrise and sunset? And they would have thoughts having 12 hours was just insane?

but not so much to remember as the gender thing.

They counted in 12s and 60s because your thumb can count 12 finger segments (on the same hand as the thumb). Then put one finger down on your other hand and count 12 again on the original hand. Put one finger down for the next 12 etc until you have 5x12.

Hence 60 seconds/ minutes, 12 hours etc

@MrsTerryPratchett

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?

Italian also has "Lo" ... "Lo specchio, lo zucchero" ...

That's interesting, @WhatsWrongWithMyUsername. I knew they used base-60 but I didn't know that was the reason.

The Romans divided the day and night into 12 hours each, but the length of each hour varied depending on the time of year: nighttime hours were longer during winter and shorter during summer.

Fun fact: in German a spoon is masculine, a fork is feminine and a knife is neuter 🤯

[quote SoHappyToBeAMum]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/[/quote]
That’s a great article. And a fascinating thread!

Italian Lo is just before certain letters/ letter combinations. I wonder why il zucchero offended their ears.

[quote mathanxiety]@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.[/quote]
It was the gendered nouns I meant ... I found it a strange concept when learning Irish. It starts to make sense after a while though.

@WhatsWrongWithMyUsername

Italian Lo is just before certain letters/ letter combinations. I wonder why il zucchero offended their ears.

If you try to say them both lo zucchero is much easier.

I love this thread. I never could get my head round the concept of who decided and how French/foreign kids were supposed to know

The real question, though, is why did English drop its gendered nouns?
... All the other languages that English evolved from had them, so why? Just to feel a bit special and unique?

A bit like the great vowel shift. WTF, why? Why does the "long" version of an "a" sound more like "ey" (mat, but mate), and "e" (as in get) sounds sometimes more like "iiiii" or "uh" (even), and "i" can be pronounced like "kit", or "kite", and "u" like "sure", or "but", etc.
... How are English kids supposed to learn how to read using phonics, when vowels don't even make consistent sounds, and you need to place them in the context of the whole word to parse them?

There are some guidelines eg -ion and -ette ending words are invariably feminine (except for squelette) Kids find it really hard to grasp, I’ve been teaching the concept recently and telling them it’s not who an item belongs to, but the item or person so your mum is feminine even if you’re a boy so ta mère, not ton. Seems to get them to understand.

It’s always annoyed me for some reason that ange is masculine.

@TatianaBis

It’s always annoyed me for some reason that ange is masculine.

Angels are masculine though.

@TatianaBis

It’s always annoyed me for some reason that ange is masculine.

It comes from the Greek, ‘angelos’, meaning ‘messenger’, which is a masculine noun. Does anyone know what gender angels are in the Hebrew Bible?

@seethesuninwintertime

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 letters were pronounced because knight comes from German knecht via cniht.

Angels are masculine though

Angels in the bible are male because it was written by misogynist patriarchs.

But everyone knows angels are pretty ladies with wings.

It comes from the Greek, ‘angelos’, meaning ‘messenger’, which is a masculine noun.

That seems fairer.

I’ve been out out, but it has made my day that there are 5 pages to catch up on.

Mercifully, for everyone here I am not going to attempt to read or respond now.

I’ll be back.

I haven't read the whole thread but I love it! I always wondered who made those illogical decisions My French is pretty fluent after 18 years here and an A level for a good grounding but there are many, many nouns for which I cannot for the life of me remember the bloody gender. In speech you can kind of swallow it, but if I'm writing I end up looking loads up. Sometimes the same ones every time - I think middle age has destroyed my memory. Complicated verb conjunctions are no problem and I can trot out 'j'aurais dû' and thé like with confidence but genders.., nope. Ditto in German though I like Italian where all the masculine nouns end in o and feminine in a!

Je retour?
J'ai retournee?

Sommat like that?!