La Barbe: Feminine Beards and Other Mysteries of French Grammatical Gender

Robin F. Keller, University of Rhode Island

Abstract

Grammatical gender in French language is one of the biggest guessing games for a native English speaker. Why a table is feminine and a book is masculine is a question that plagues those learning French as a second language. In French, all nouns have gender, masculine and feminine. The complication: only a small percentage of the nouns are assigned gender semantically leaving the remaining which are assigned gender seemingly arbitrarily. For English native speakers, the distinction of these basic parts in a foreign language is not a natural skill. The simple fact that nouns are either feminine or masculine is troubling to students of the French language.

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Another Example of Word Ending Centered Approach to Gender

Another Example of Word Ending Centered Approach to Gender : Language Guide (français)

Here what it says :-----------------------------------------------------------------------

Expect all nouns to be masculine unless they end in mute e. Except for the following endings which are masculine to a large degree (despite ending in mute e ) -ge, -le (except -lle, -ole, -ale or -ule), -me, -re (except -ure) and -phe and the following, which are feminine to a large degree (despite not ending in mute e ) -on, -é and -eur

I call this the non sacred rule because it has so many exceptions. While you can't rely on this rule to determine noun gender on the fly, it can serve as a good starting point for approaching and learning the gender of nouns. In the following pages, french nouns are organized by the rule along with exceptions. 

Here what it should say : -----------------------------------------------------------------

Expect all nouns to be masculine unless they end in (mute) e.  

Except for the following SUFFIXES which are masculine  (despite ending in mute e )

-age, -ège, -isme, -asme, -oire, -aire,  -acle, -ile, -ème, -ome

and the following, which are feminine  (despite not ending in mute e )

-ion (and derived forms -aison, -son or -çon)), -ité (and derived forms -té or -tié) and -eur.

The so-called EXCEPTIONS are simply words that don't derived from those suffixes.

The word MASSAGE was formed with the verb MASSER to which the masculine suffixe -age (action or result of a verb) was added - Logically, MASSAGE is masculine - This is not the case for the word PAGE which has nothing to do with suffixe -age and therefore is feminine.

Suffixes, unlike endings,  have meaning.

  

MORE on the topic on this page MAUVAIS GENRE