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.

This is a great question OP and it's now really got me thinking!

@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 🤷

French for "vagina" is le vagin.

@GrrrlPwr

Je retour? J'ai retournee?

Sommat like that?!

Retourner is one of those verbs that takes être in the passé compose

So it's Je suis retourné for men and Je suis retournée for women.

I speak fluent Welsh and we have masculine and feminine words that influence mutations. Never in a million years could I explain it, but I understand it.

dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order

I never could get my head round the concept of who decided and how French/foreign kids were supposed to know
Maybe the same way English speaking children absorb the correct order of adjectives in English.

From living in France 30 years ago some of our French friends were rounded up in the town centre and arrested one night. There was some confusion amongst English students around I think “Le poste” which meant police station. We only knew “La poste” which is post office. We were like “why would the post office be open at this time of night”.

I could have mis remembered this as it was 30 years ago.

@JesusInTheCabbageVan

I want to know how often French children get it wrong when they're learning. Are there some who just take ages to get it? Do they ever get it wrong on purpose for a laugh?

I was educated in French from ages 4-10. The whole m/f nouns really dragged me down and I was branded stupid etc. It all seemed so random. I could just about deal with “if it ends in e, it’s feminine”, except for the exceptions! Some stuck by frequent use and repetition.

Age 10 I moved to a little, local CoE primary and realised I was reasonably clever when I was able to communicate in a language I spoke!

@grooveonthemove

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 🤦

Ah but language changes and evolves, a 'bonnet' used to be a man's hat in English so you would assume if English used genders the same as some languages it would be masculine, but it now refers to a type of hat worn by Victorian women.

Sometimes the word stays the same and the meaning changes eg bonnet but other times the meaning stays the same but the words change, my grandparents always listened to the wireless never the radio.

There are a few signs in BSL for 'phone' but one is occasionally used for 'toilet' as phones were often put in restaurants by the toilets.

Another odd coincidence is that one of the signs for 'toilet' is also the sigh for 'Belgium'

Is any one from the Wet Country, I've heard inanimate objects called 'he' and 'she', does anyone know why a tractor might be female?

And then ships, ships are always 'she' even when the name is 'Mr X'

BTW for anyone interested in this who hasn't already got a background in linguistics ask for David Chrystal's book on Language for Christmas.

West country, not wet country, that would be Lancashire

The "Académie" or "Academia" of various continental European countries don't have much authority on words derived from Latin from.

These are a fait-accompli.

The Académie did not randomly audit nouns and decide on a case by case basis thou shalt be feminine or masculine.

In most case genders are the same in French Italian Portuguese and Spanish.

"Church" as someone mentioned above is feminine in all these languages because église, iglesia and chiesa derive from "ecclesia" . It may be a phonetic rule.

unA chiesA
unE églisE

It is also likely that many rules with their own exceptions are influencing language so perhaps sound and animated objects and actual projected gender: sun masculine and earth feminine (Ouranos male Gaia female in Greek mythology).

However the académies may have more say in modern words or imported words. Whether their decisions are actually adopted in everyday language is a different matter.

@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 🤷

On the subject of penises, it’s funny that pénis and zizi are masculine but verge, bite & teub are feminine. (Verge meaning rod, bite is sort of 18c, teub derived from bite I think).

What an interesting thread OP. I have often wondered to what extent language influences thought. So, for example, do French people view the world (and everything in it) as either male or female? Whereas we English speakers see the world as neutral? But then, as a previous poster said, some things are considered to be female like a ship and referred to as 'she'.

I heard a fascinating talk on the radio one day about languages. The interviewee said that in one language the speakers are less specific about counting. When we're counting, we say one, two, three, four, five and so on. They have a word which means a few (maybe less than four) and another word which might mean more than four and less than eight and so on. Blew my mind!

@sashh thanks for the book recommendation. If anyone else has any book suggestions, please post them. I'd love to read more on the subject.

@Taytocrisps David Chrystal has written a few, the one on English is good too.

His son is an actor and they have worked together to produce Shakespeare in the original accent.

Taytocrisps I don't think people think of words as male or female. It is just part of the word. When I point out how odd le vagin sounds to us, they are quite surprised (not that I do it very often 😂). My U3A students don't like the words male or female in English though - those words are for animals.

Love the Antigone article and all the responses.

The Antigone journal looks like fun -cool pics :)

On the subject of penises, it’s funny that pénis and zizi are masculine but verge, bite & teub are feminine. (Verge meaning rod, bite is sort of 18c, teub derived from bite I think)

In my language penis is neuter and the equivalent of dick is feminine. In fact most words penis related are feminine or neuter with very very few masculine options. Some men actually complained about that.

I like the idea that people in ancient societies distinguished animate from inanimate but that their concept of animate might not have been the same as ours.
That’s rathe4 beautiful I think.

....rather.....

I think adult learners of languages get a bit het up about genders. I know that I struggle to express a sentence with a noun in it if I can't get the gender right. I am learning a scandinavian language. These languages have the additional headache of sometimes making a word incomprehensible if you get the gender wrong when saying the - or even worse a pluarl the (like "the ideas"). How i long for le or la like in french.

We moved here a few months ago and dd (aged 8) doesn't care and just babbels away. Not a worry if she gets wrong. And the world doesn't stop! (Whereas i get mortified at my grammatical ignorance being exposed - at which point they switch to english and I get peed off with them and myself....I wish i could be as blasé as an 8 year learning a language).

bite is not 18th c, it's super common. teub is verlan for bite.

@Caffeinefirst you remember right, le poste would be the police station in your example though it has other meanings as well. It can mean a radio for instance.

@KeflavikAirport

bite is not 18th c, it's super common. teub is verlan for bite.

I didn’t mean it wasn’t used now, just that it goes back to the 18c at least.

(I’m half French btw)

oh right. It sounded a bit like it wasn't used any more. It's been in use since the late 16th c or so.

I do find you have to be careful with the word megabyte. 😂

The real question, though, is why did English drop its gendered nouns.

I've read that dropping the genders happened quite early - when there was a mix of Vikings and Saxons and other languages and dialects spoken in England. It made it easier for people to communicate when trading. But I've also read (MN) that genders were still in use in middle English which would be later than that.

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?

Teaching phonics is quite complicated, and the children have to learn the whole phonics system, rather than just the sounds letters make, and an adult correcting you with the exceptions like in the 80s (when I was at school). Today the children learn all the combinations and sounds (ew - screw oo- moon, oe- shoe sound the same, but spelt differently, plus the spelt the same but sound different eg. moon, book). They are taught phonics in an intensive way.

It certainly really helps some children, but phonics doesn't suit every child.
It also can be complicated by various dialects - where I grew up newspaper is pronounced how it's spelt, where I live it's pronounced noospaper.

I was pondering the origins of why tear (crying) and tear (rip) are spelt the same. Perhaps it's like the silent k in Knight and originally they were both pronounced t-ear.