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.

Yes attendance is now obligatory from three.

@TatianaBis

It's a European thing - schooling starts later across Europe.

French is a very easy language to learn (and the other Romance languages) as they're so much more regular than English. I can't say silent letters ever bothered me much.

I don't know why the UK starts schooling so young, it doesn't seem to have much effect.

Ha ha. French is NOT regular. There are so many ways of representing a particular sound and there are lots of irregular verbs.

Sorry if someone said it already

But as per Emily in Paris, the vagina is masculine! Seriously?!

@seethesuninwintertime

There is a problem here as words like boss are masculine.

It’s time like some do in Spanish to use an x so words to do with jobs or status are non gender specific.

Always wondered why beard was feminine!

God?

I think it’s just to catch no native speakers out. I hated learning French, there was no rhyme or reason to the bastard nouns.

"French is NOT regular."

I learned both English and French as foreign languages. French is by far the more regular one.

"There are so many ways of representing a particular sound"

All those different ways of spelling in fact represent subtly different sounds.

I would like to know what on earth you do with gender neutral people? Instead of il est anglais or Elle est angalises do you go for Ils sont anglais? But then that’s multiple people

@DaisyDreaming there's a new pronoun, iel, used as a gender neutral. It's quite controversial though.

French may be phonetically regular but my kids spent ages learning various combinations of vowels that made slightly different sounds. They also sounded out the -ent at the end of 3rd person plural verbs for a while, suggesting getting your head round silent letters is complicated. I think that while English is very irregular in spelling, there might not be so many variant sounds attached to each letter so you can start simple and build in complexity, whereas in French you're straight into the hard stuff as soon as you have a verb. I'm just wondering though, I have no evidence.

Like, in English, you can easiy build a sentence with more or less one-to-one equivalents between letters and sounds like "the cat sat on the mat". Kid learns letters and sounds, job's a good'un. You can't do that in French. "le chat est sur le tapis" > you don't pronounce the T in chat, the S or the T in est, or the S in tapis. Try explaining that to a four year old.

Ha ha. French is NOT regular. There are so many ways of representing a particular sound and there are lots of irregular verbs.

Of course French is more regular than English - that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have irregular verbs - which you learn as chunk.

The regularity of Romance languages means you can learn others quite easily one you’ve done one because they follow the same pattern.

Love this thread. I've never understood the idea that almost everyone was speaking Proto Indo European and then it splintered off into all the different families. Surely there would have been more wildly different languages to start with as there was so little mobility and people were locked away geographically. Like Papua New Guinea now where there are hundreds of distinct languages even where people are geographically quite close.

There's grammatical regularity and phonetic regularity. I'm no expert but I think French is pretty phonetically regular in that one letter combo = one sound quite reliably, there are just loads of them to learn and half of them are silent half the time. You don't really get any of that fish = GHOTI nonsense.

@StartupRepair archeology shows people have always traded across quite long distances, even in the Stone Age, so I guess there was always a need for a lingua franca to talk to the people across the valley who might want to exchange fruit for wool or something.

@KeflavikAirport

Like, in English, you can easiy build a sentence with more or less one-to-one equivalents between letters and sounds like "the cat sat on the mat". Kid learns letters and sounds, job's a good'un. You can't do that in French. "le chat est sur le tapis" > you don't pronounce the T in chat, the S or the T in est, or the S in tapis. Try explaining that to a four year old.

All that really means though is that you learn it in a slightly different way.

So much of language learning is aural particularly in childhood.

@StartupRepair Proto-Indo-European was initially spoken by a small group in the Ukrainian steppes, but rapid expansion (facilitated by the fact that they learned to ride horses!) meant their languages supplanted the myriad language families that already existed in Europe - Basque is basically the only survivor!

I don't know, I think the latter is inherently trickier than the former because the connection between sight and sound is more complex. Maybe it requires a higher degree of abstract thought or something.

I had to learn both French and German at secondary school age. Overall English much easier, but....if given an unknown word in both, French much easier to know how to pronounce.

But that’s presumably because you learnt French as a second language.

And with your kids presumably they’re learning 2 languages at once with different rules.

Any first solo language learnt in childhood is the same degree of difficulty imo, however hard it is for non-speakers to learn.

I’ve genuinely never come across the idea before that French was hard. Compared to Russian or Mandarin it’s a doddle.

"I’ve genuinely never come across the idea before that French was hard. Compared to Russian or Mandarin it’s a doddle."

I agree. I think a lot of native English speakers find European languages difficult because, rightly or wrongly, languages are not prioritised in our education system and curriculum. But European languages are much, much easier for English speakers to learn than languages like Arabic, Mandarin, Russian, etc.

"I had to learn both French and German at secondary school age. Overall English much easier",
Bizarre, not sure what I was thinking/writing. I meant: I was learning both English and French at secondary school. French considered more diffiucult, followed by German, then English. However when to guess how to pronoucne a word English most difficult.

There are regularities but it’s to do with the sounds in the word and not the meaning of the word. It’s got fuck all to do with biological sex or even gender as in having characteristics traditionally associated with a particular sex in a particular society. Animals have grammar gender that is distinct from the sex of the individual animal. So le chat is cat even if it’s female and la souris is mouse even if it’s a male. Confusingly you can say ´la chatte’ and ´la chienne’ to be precise about a particular female pet but you have to be careful because ´la chatte’ also means ´pussy’ as in female genitalia and ´la chienne’ also means ´bitch’ although the French do prefer to insult women by calling them whores ´la pute’.

if given an unknown word in both, French much easier to know how to pronounce

This makes sense. I did a bit of digging and found the orthographic depth hypothesis: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthographic_depth#:~:text=The%20orthographic%20depth%20of%20an,%2Done%20letter%E2%80%93phoneme%20correspondence.&text=In%20shallow%20orthographies%2C%20the%20spelling,to%20pronounce%20the%20word%20correctly.

I recommend David Crystal's books, too. Also, Guy Deutscher, Through the Language Glass, which has a chapter on how characteristics of things are most frequently perceived in different languages, according to whether they are masculine or feminine nouns, e.g. a bridge might be strong and sturdy, or elegant, according to whether it's le pont or die Brücke, for example.

I have been learning foreign languages since I was 11, and I never really associated linguistic gender with human sex. It's just a thing you need to learn when learning vocabulary (which was much easier as a child, than it is now in my 40s.) I have found prepositions are usually one of the trickier things to learn - do you go on the bus, by bus, with the bus? And in Welsh, bloody mutations. How hard do you have to make it for learners to have words changing at the start of the word? (In other news, I have a Welsh class in a short while. In which I am more likely to remember French.)

I've always been glad I haven't had to learn English as a foreign language.

I think french German etc would be easier to learn as a native English speaker if you'd had to do some Latin. I didn't and all the cases were mystifying. Mind you, we also didn't get taught English grammar either. We just had to 'pick it up'.

I actually found Japanese not too bad. It's very regular sentence construction, very regular verbs. No le/la to remember.
But the adjectives made sense to me, some books the 'some' is a different word to some tennis balls- because books are papery and flat, whereas tennis balls are spherical.

Slightly crazy but it makes sense. Just got to get past the 2 alphabet systems, and kanji characters. But after that it's a doddle!