Mauvais genre

Le genre des noms inanimés (en arabe)

2011-11-09T21:22:00.000-08:00

Gender of French Nouns by ending QUIZ

2011-10-16T20:58:00.000-07:00

Can you name the Gender of French Nouns by ending?

Created by Gameater14

READY? CLICK TO START

Adult L2 Acquisition of French Grammatical Gender

2011-03-21T03:52:00.000-07:00

Investigating sensitivity to phonological and morphological gender cues

Carol Sisson

Honours Thesis

May 2006

McGill University

Supervisor: Professor Lydia White

PDF

Gender App up-date

2011-01-03T17:49:00.000-08:00

Gender Confusion

Free Application for Android Phone World's Number One Tweet Client.

Description on the Android Market

Gender Confusion helps you learn the genders of French nouns by quizzing you and showing why your answers are right or wrong.

While some words don't follow any rule, there are many guidelines to help you remember if a French word is masculine or feminine. Gender Confusion has a database of words and many of these rules, and randomly generates a quiz to drill you in the use of the rules.

All about French Nouns: Focus on Gender

2010-12-20T05:38:00.000-08:00

By Mary Naber Burns

Universal Publishers, 1998

ISBN: 1-58112-871-1

Of the forty-three thousand words in a comprehensive French dictionary, almost thirty-three are nouns. Determining the gender of these nouns is one of the great stumbling blocks on the road to learning French. Although it is true that gender becomes a factor in dealing with articles, adjectives, past participles and pronouns, these four parts of speech modify or refer to nouns, whether expressed or implied; noun gender is always the initiating factor. Noun gender is the problem.

In here, Mary Naber Burns regroups nouns under two gender rules: masculine and feminine listes. Great work but too much focus on ending patterns as usual...

Read the article

Grammar experts needed for pope comment on condoms

2010-11-22T01:08:00.001-08:00

Blog Reuter

Male prostitutes? Did Pope Benedict actually say that only male prostitutes can use condoms to avoid transmitting the HIV virus? Why did he limit this unsuspected flexibility only to men?

Well, it’s not actually clear from the new book Light of the World, where this statement appears, that he is only talking about male prostitutes. [...]

The problem is that the pope gave the interview in his native German [...]. The key phrase about condom use reads in the English translation: “There may be a basis in the case of some individuals, as perhaps when a male prostitute uses a condom, where this can be the first step in the direction of a moralisation.”

In German, Benedict says “ein Prostituierter,” which signifies a prostitute of the masculine gender. This could refer literally to a man. But he could also be using the grammatical masculine gender, the default when speaking about any human individual in general. [...]. Benedict could have made himself clearer by expressly saying “male prostitute” — “ein männlicher Prostituierter” — but he didn’t. [...]

The English translator got around this by adding the adjective “male.” The French translator was able to follow the German example and write “un prostitué” in the masculine gender rather than “une prostituée.” But Italian grammar apparently doesn’t allow such an easy switch, so the Vatican daily referred to “una prostituta” in the feminine gender.

New technology but...

2010-11-06T05:40:00.000-07:00

REFLEXARIUM 'French Gender' is an iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad application presented as a "personal French tutor" to help learners to memorize the gender of 1300 French nouns. The idea, concept and realization of this app are good but the content is still THE SAME GOOD OLD CRAP about gender. The all issue is again reduced to a mere list of endings!

In this app, words are arranged by endings, the usual (wrong) way to present the problem. One of the examples in the Youtube demo is the group of nouns with ending –a.

The app tells you that “normally, the gender for nouns ending with –A would be male” which is absolutely correct, though it does not tell you why. In the quiz to help you memorize the gender of these -A ending words, you will be ask to guess their gender at random. Every time you run into a feminine noun, you will be told that “this noun is an exception and is female.”

You are supposed to repeat the quizz again and again until you remember the gender of all the nouns from the list without knowing why and how. Why some -A ending nouns are male and some other female? You will never find out. Is it going to help you find the gender of nouns outside the pre-installed list? The answer is no. Just learn stupidement like a parrot !!!!

Here are some of the words from the app:

EXTRA, COBRA, SAMBA, CAMELIA, GHEISHA, CHOLERA, PIZZA, DELTA, CAMERA, CORRIDA, SCHEMA, SALSA, AGENDA, GHEISHA, ARMADA, OPERA, VERANDA, CODA, MAGMA, BOA, COBRA

GHEISHA (the correct spelling is actually GEISHA) and COBRA are repeated twice.

CODA ? I did not know the meaning of that word before I looked into the dictionary. How usefull! Anyway, here is not the issue.

In this application, what are the options?

Choice : masculine VS feminine

Answers : correct VS wrong

Explanations: follows the rule VS exceptions to the rule

This is where all the ENDING PATTERN METHODS fail. They don't provide any reasonable explanation. They are very poor in term of content and feedback given to learners.

Now, see how a CATEGORY BASED METHOD would deal with the same list of words.

Judge for yourself

If we arrange those exact same words into categories following the cause of the gender attribution, we will understand why some are male when some are female. This will help us find the gender of words outside that list.

Category 1.

Unmarked nouns are male (nouns not marked with a final –e), thus nouns ending in –A are male: un EXTRA, le CHOLERA, un SCHEMA, un DELTA, un AGENDA, du MAGMA, un BOA, un COBRA. We can call them regular. Here are included nouns zith suffix –IA used to name flower plants such as un CAMELIA

Category 2.

Loanwords from other romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese or even Latin) which are still bearing their original feminine marker –A, remain female in French: une SAMBA, une PIZZA, une CAMERA(Latin), une CORRIDA, une SALSA, une ARMADA, une VERANDA, une CODA (One exception though, OPERA, female in Italian, but male in French) Most of these nouns have strong Mediterranean and South-American cultural/political/social connotations.

Category 3.

Natural gender bearing nouns: GEISHA is feminine (une geisha) due to its meaning not to its ending. Referring to a woman, the noun GEISHA is naturally feminine. For the same reason, YAKUSA is male.

Knowing these 3 categories 1) regular (including botanical suff. -ia) 2) romance loanwords 3) natural gender, it is possible to guess the gender of other nouns ending in -a:

Time for practice...

yoga - acacia - Canada - diva - coma - corrida - cinéma - mafia - gardénia - maharaja - salsa - tata - panda - papa - villa - dahlia - fiesta - magnolia - eczéma - cafétéria - pacha - chipolata - guérilla - lama - nana - Panama - favela - karma - pizzéria - pétunia - pasta - zona

Choose a category for each noun and give the corresponding gender:

1. Regular masculine nouns :....................................................

Including suffix -ia (name of plants) :..............................................

2. Natural gender:

Men:............................................

Women:........................................

3. Romance loanwords:.....................................................................

The answer will be given in the next post.

MAUVAIS GENRE the website

French NUAGE m. vs Spanish NUBE f.

2010-10-30T22:16:00.000-07:00

The Open Applied Linguistics Journal, 2008, Volume 1 / p. 69

In the journal article Grammatical Gender Affects Bilinguals’ Conceptual Gender: Implications for Linguistic Relativity and Decision Making , it is said:

Some nouns that are grammatically masculine and feminine in French are the opposite grammatical genders in Spanish. Hence, a cloud is masculine in French un nuage, but feminine in Spanish: una nube.

I wanted to insert a comment on the origin of two words French NUAGE and Spanish NUBE.

French NUE f. (cloud) which was replaced later by its derivative (NUE + suff. -age m.) and Spanish NUBE f. both come from Latin nuba f., and are both feminine. French changed NUE f. into a masculine noun by the addition of a masculine suffix.

French NUE f. gave another feminine derivative meaning large cloud with feminine suffix -ée: NUEE f.

CNRTL

NUE f. D'un lat. pop. *nuba, altération du lat. class. nubes «nuage; essaim; multitude; obscurité, voile (fig.)»

NUAGE m. Dér. de nue* auquel il s'est substitué; suff. -age (suff. masculin)

NUEE f. Dér. de nue*; suff. -ée, v. -é.

Prima-elementa: nubes, nubis, f.

Grammatical Gender Affects Bilinguals’ Conceptual Gender

2010-10-30T21:37:00.000-07:00

The Open Applied Linguistics Journal, 2008, 1, 68-76

Grammatical Gender Affects Bilinguals’ Conceptual Gender: Implications for Linguistic Relativity and Decision Making

James N. Forbes, Diane Poulin-Dubois, Magda R. Rivero and Maria D. Sera

Abstract:

We used a non-linguistic gender attribution task to determine how French and Spanish grammatical gender affects bilinguals’ conceptual gender. French-English and Spanish-English bilingual, as well as English monolingual adults were asked to assign a male or female voice to 32 color drawings depicting people, animals, and common objects. French-English and Spanish-English bilinguals classified items according to French and Spanish grammatical gender respectively. This effect was replicated for French-English bilinguals on those items whose grammatical gender was opposite in French and Spanish. Unexpectedly, Spanish gender similarly affected classifications by Spanish-English and English-Spanish bilinguals, as well as English monolinguals. We discuss how grammatical gender, possible covariates, and the order of L1 and L2 acquisition, affect conceptual gender as well as implications for decision making. READ MORE

Shedding the light on French grammatical gender...or not

2010-10-30T02:33:00.000-07:00

Author: Ayoun, Dalila

Source: EUROSLA Yearbook, Volume 10, Number 1, 2010 , pp. 119-141(23)

Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company

Abstract:

The present corpus study analyzes 5,016 contextualized DPs drawn from 34 current newspaper and magazine articles to test the so-far unsubstantiated claim that the input provides abundant and clear evidence of the grammatical gender of French nouns. Findings show that 49.76% of noun tokens are not gender-marked; 9.01% of nouns lack a gender-marked determiner, but are modified by a gender-marked adjective; while 41.22% of nouns have a gender-marked determiner. Detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses provide a descriptive and explanatory account of gender-marked contexts and second language learnability implications are discussed. The lack of readily available word-external clues explains why the acquisition of French grammatical gender is notoriously difficult (e.g., Ayoun 2007).

Document Type: Research article

Genre, nombre et prépositions des départements

2010-10-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

Excellente page sur le genre des noms de départements français

Sur le site LE CABINET DES CURIOSITES

"Les départements prennent le genre du cours d'eau (la Loire), du massif (le Jura), du mont (le Cantal), du point géographique (le Finistère, le Nord), du littoral (la Manche) qui leur donne leur nom.

Certains noms sont composés de deux hydronymes : le Loir-et-Cher (deux noms masculins), l'Ille-et-Vilaine (deux noms féminins), la Meurthe-et-Moselle (idem), l'Indre-et-Loire (idem), la Saône-et-Loire (idem), le Tarn-et-Garonne (masculin et féminin), le Lot-et-Garonne (idem). Le masculin est placé en premier, il donne le genre et le nom reste au singulier.

Un cas particulier : le Maine-et-Loire est constitué de la rivière la Maine et du fleuve la Loire. Par analogie avec l'ancienne province du Maine (Sarthe et Mayenne), le premier nom est devenu masculin. Un autre cas particulier : l'Eure-et-Loir (féminin et masculin) devient masculin par attraction des autres départements construits de manière similaire et parce que le nom commence par une voyelle qui masque le genre.

Certains noms sont déterminés par une catégorie géographique :
– les Bouches-du-Rhône ;
– la Côte-d'Or ;
– les Côtes-d'Armor (anciennement Côtes-du-Nord) ;
– les Hauts-de-Seine ;
– le Pas-de-Calais ;
– le Puy-de-Dôme ;
– le Territoire-de-Belfort ;
– le Val-de-Marne.
C'est le nom déterminant qui donne le genre et le nombre.

D'autres noms sont déterminés par un adjectif :
– Hautes-Alpes ;
– Haute-Corse ;
– Haute-Garonne ;
– Haute-Loire ;
– Hautes-Pyrénées ;
– Pyrénées-Orientales ;
– Bas-Rhin ;
– Haut-Rhin ;
– Haute-Saône ;
– Haute-Savoie ;
– Haute-Seine ;
– Haute-Vienne.

Un nom possède un genre hésitant : la Vaucluse était à l'origine la vallée fermée ou Valleclusa (1050), on trouve une première mention de 1034, sous la forme castellum Vallem Clusam. Le changement de genre en le Vaucluse a des conséquences sur l'emploi de la préposition.

Un nom est devenu féminin alors que son éponyme est masculin : la Lozère tire son nom du mont Lozère.

Sont masculins les noms qui ne finissent pas par un e caduc : le Morbihan (la mer intérieure), le Calvados, Tarn, Rhône, Gard, Gers, Cantal, Allier, Cher, Doubs, Hérault, Jura, Loiret, Loir, Lot, Ain, Aveyron. "

How to Tell the Grammatical Gender of Latin Words

2010-10-28T08:43:00.000-07:00

Article by John Garger
Edited & published by Rebecca Scudder on Sep 25, 2010

Latin nouns, pronouns, and adjectives all have a gender. Knowing the gender of a Latin word is key to properly understanding Latin grammar. Learn why Latin words have gender and how to recognize whether Latin words are masculine, feminine, or neuter.

Unlike English, the gender of a Latin word is necessary to apply the various grammatical rules. In Latin, parts of speech with gender include nouns, pronouns, and adjectives which may be masculine, feminine, or neuter. While the gender of some of these parts of speech is obvious, others are not. This fact has two effects. First, it gives native-English speakers a difficult time because they are not used to thinking of inanimate objects as having a gender. Second, failure to memorize the gender of words from the beginning proves disastrous later in intermediate and advanced Latin courses of study.

Is this the reason for grammatical gender?

2010-10-17T21:12:00.000-07:00

What (can) come next?

15/October/2010

But the thought that occured to me was that complex and seemingly unnecessary features like grammatical gender can serve to reduce noise in oral communications.

Languages that mark grammatical gender in articles, like Dutch or French, sharply reduce the number of words that can follow them given their context, while the amount of information that has to be stored in the lexicon to make this gain in noise reduction is very small. In French with just two genders, it’s just one bit of information per noun.

I suspect that by losing grammatical gender, Haitian Creole has had to create other distinctions to compensate. The thing is, given a reasonable corpus, this hypothesis should be empirically confirmable.

PURGGE People United for the Reduction of Grammatical Gender Everywhere

Reading derivationally affixed french words

2010-10-17T20:15:00.000-07:00

Authors: V. M. Holmes^a; J. K. O'regan^b

Abstract

The recognition of multimorphemic French words was investigated using a procedure that allowed the position of first fixation of the eye to be manipulated and gaze durations to be recorded. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that prefixed and suffixed words were recognised most rapidly when the eye started at points at which the words' stem could be seen distinctly. In Experiment 2, gaze durations for prefixed words equated for surface frequency were longer for words with low-frequency rather than high-frequency stems. The findings support the idea that complex words are accessed in terms of their stem, and that the order in which affixes are listed in an entry is determined by the surface frequency of the entire word formed by the stem plus affix. Alternative accounts of the findings were considered.

Psychology Press

Gender QUIZ

2010-09-01T06:56:00.000-07:00

Answer a 100 question QUIZ

on GENDER in French (beginner level)

about.com website.

And come back here for more insights

----------------------------------------------------------------------

So what is your score ?

In this QUIZ, 90 words out of one hundred follow the basic GENDER RULE, that is to say nouns ending in -e are feminine (fraise, cerise, armoire...), other endings are masculine (couloir, cours, jardin...). So this was an easy one.

Ten nouns don't follow the basic gender rule:

Six have irregular suffixes or endings:

-fromage (cheese) and visage (face) like hundreds of other nouns are derived from masculine suffix -age

-addition and maison (house) are derived from feminine suffix -ion / -aison

avion (plane) is derived from regular masculine suffix -on, and is therefore masculine (the Latine root AVI- means bird like in avian flue)

- dentifrice (toothpaste) is a tricky one as it belongs to the bivalent suffix -ice family.

- musée like lycée, scarabée., caducée.. is masculine due to its learned ending

4 words are PURE exceptions

-dent (tooth) and main (hand) are two feminine exceptions.

-coude (elbow) is masculine like its Latin etymon cubĭtus m.)

-pamplemousse (grapefruit) is masculine though the original noun in Dutch was feminine.

Battle of the French genders

2010-08-27T19:35:00.000-07:00

Language Route

By Pascale

Sexisme dans la langue française ? Masculin ou féminin ? La guerre des sexes a toujours eu lieu et certains s’amusent même à prendre la langue française à partie ! En voici un exemple trouvé sur le net:

La langue française est parfois bizarre ! UN HOMME ÉCRIT:

"Voici UNE leçon de grammaire amusante : Pourquoi, dès que c'est UNE galère, c'est tout de suite au FÉMININ ? LA pluie, LA neige, LA grêle, LA tempête, tout ça, c'est pour vous les FEMMES!

Nous, les hommes, c'est LE soleil, LE beau temps, LE printemps, LE paradis!

Vous, vous n'avez vraiment pas de chance : LA vaisselle, LA cuisine, LA bouffe, LA poussière, LA saleté, LA balayeuse.

Nous, c'est LE café dans LE fauteuil avec LE journal en écoutant LE hockey et ça pourrait être LE bonheur si vous ne veniez pas semer LA discorde et LA chicane.

Pour retrouver LE calme, je crois que nous devrions laisser LE genre décider.

Vous pouvez regarder LA télé, mais nous choisissons LE poste. Même si LA télécommande vous appartient, nous avons LE contrôle.

D'ailleurs, dès que c'est sérieux, comme par hasard, c'est tout de suite au MASCULIN. On dit UNE rivière, UNE marre d'eau, mais on dit UN fleuve, UN océan. On dit UNE trottinette, mais UN avion à réaction! Et quand il y a UN problème dans UN avion, c'est tout de suite UNE catastrophe.

C'est toujours la faute d'UNE erreur de pilotage, d'UNE panne d'essence, d'UNE mauvaise visibilité, bref, toujours à cause d'UNE connerie.

Et, alors là, attention mesdames, dès que LA connerie est faite par UN homme, ça ne s'appelle plus UNE connerie, ça s'appelle UN impondérable.

Enfin, moi, si j'étais vous les FEMMES, je ferais UNE pétition. Et il faut faire très vite parce que votre situation s'aggrave de jour en jour.

Y'a pas si longtemps, vous aviez LA logique, LA bonne vieille logique FÉMININE. Ça ne nous a pas plu, nous les HOMMES, nous avons inventé LE logiciel.

Mais, vous avez quand même quelquefois des petits avantages: Nous avons LE mariage, LE divorce; vous avez LA pension, LA maison. Vous avez LA carte de crédit, nous avons LE découvert. "

« RÉPONSE D'UNE FEMME :

Cher Monsieur,

Si vous aviez consulté une femme avant de publier votre fameuse leçon, vous auriez sans doute renoncé à le faire, bien que marrante soit-elle! Mais, quand même, voilà en retour la vraie leçon qui a dû vous échapper :

Pourquoi à chaque fois qu'il y a une réussite, UNE victoire ou UNE gloire, il y a toujours UNE FEMME derrière ?

Mais, quand il y a UN drame, UN malheur, UN vol, UN viol et UN harcèlement sexuel, il y a UN HOMME derrière ?

Et voyons le masculin sur quelques plans :

Côté Météo :

LE mauvais temps, LE nuage, LE vent, L'orage, LE tonnerre, dans tout ça, LA visibilité n'a pas de place et boom, voilà UN accident! Quel drame!

Côté santé :

Quel malheur quand l'humanité a connu : LE cancer, LE SIDA, LE SRAS. Au féminin, ce n'est que LA grippe, LA fatigue, et ça passe!

Côté social:

C'est LE crédit, LE chômage, LE malaise, LE stress, LE crime, LE vol, LE viol, LE suicide, LE terrorisme, et voilà LE massacre ! Ceci a tué LA tranquillité, LA sérénité, LA stabilité, LA paix et LA sécurité !

Côté Amour :

Au masculin : c'est LE cœur en fer, LE coup de foudre, L'abandon et LE chagrin d'amour causé à LA femme ! Au féminin : c'est LA fidélité, LA sincérité, L'honnêteté, LA stabilité, LA vigilance, LA responsabilité et LA veille de LA préservation de LA vie conjugale.

Côté travail :

Au masculin c'est LE retard, LE laisser-aller, LE café, LE prétexte, L'égoïsme et ....! LA femme, c'est LA ponctualité, LA rentabilité, LA responsabilité et LA conscience professionnelle!

LA preuve, c'est que lors d'UNE réunion, on vous donne LA permission d'exprimer votre avis, mais, en conclusion, nous avons LA décision car on a LA bonne vision, LA précision et LA certitude !

Tout cela vous dérange et, en fin de jour, vous attendez impatiemment LA nuit pour vivre LA relaxation et LA détente.

Enfin, cher Monsieur, comme vous l'avez dit dans votre leçon : Nous avons LA logique! Oui, nous l'avons toujours et avec fierté, et, si vous avez inventé LE logiciel, malheureusement vous avez toujours LE virus en parallèle, car vous n'avez pas bien étudié L'affaire!

Pour clore mon message qui n'est autre qu'une réaction au vôtre, cher Monsieur: Si vous, les hommes, désirez avoir un peu de privilèges que nous avons nous les femmes, alors, c'est simple, on vous a accordé un terme pour l'utiliser :

Tout simplement ne dites pas : je suis UN homme..........

Mais, dites plutôt : je suis UNE personne....... »

Alors match nul dans cette guerre des sexes linguistique ? Qu’en pensez-vous ?

Writing under sexist rules

2010-08-20T20:31:00.000-07:00

Blogs from the Collins Language team in Glasgow, UK.

Gender specification through language does not pose problems to learners alone. The French authorities are struggling to find accepted, non-sexist forms of nouns to denote certain professions. Following a plan laid down by the French government to combat sexism in the late 1980s, disagreements have arisen with the body governing the use of the French language, l’Académie française.

For professions such as writers and company bosses, the accepted form is a masculine noun, écrivain and chefrespectively. The new initiative proposes that the female forms of these nouns should be écrivaine and chefesse. Here enters rhyming embarrassment. Feminizing the word chef with the suffix -esse has created a word which rhymes with the French word for buttocks, fesses. The added -e on to écrivain has created a word which means vain or empty, vaine.

Feminists are protesting at these proposed changes because they actually reinforce sexism. They say these new words promote connotations of weak, vain women or focus attention on physical attributes of the female body –altogether making a joke out of a proposal which is supposed to make everyone happy and equal.

So, what about the English equivalents? Slowly and subtly we have been doing the opposite of the French, and replacing our gender-specific nouns. For example, television and newspapers seem to have phased out the wordactress to replace it with actor regardless of the sex of the person in question.

Indeed, Collins English Dictionary includes the following note:

‘Use of the word actress to refer to a female who acts is old-fashioned. The gender-neutral form is actor.’

Whereas France wishes to separate men and women in language as in other areas – arguably keeping the sexism debate alive – English opts to ignore this and puts everyone in the same category.

Grammatical gender processing in romance languages

2010-08-09T02:24:00.000-07:00

Evidence from bare noun production in Italian and Spanish

Daniela Paolieri; Lorella Lotto; Luis Morales; Teresa Bajo; Roberto Cubelli; Remo Job

	University of Trento, Italy,
	University of Padova, Italy
	University of Granada, Spain

European Journal of Cognitive Psychology, Volume 22, Issue 3 May 2010 , pages 335 - 347

Abstract

The selection of grammatical gender in bare noun production is a controversial topic. In two experiments with the picture-word interference paradigm we confirmed a reliable effect of grammatical gender congruency in bare noun production in Italian and we replicated this effect in Spanish, another Romance language with a gender system analogous to the Italian one. In both Experiments, naming times were slower for picture-word pairs sharing grammatical gender. The results of the present study support the notion that grammatical gender is an intrinsic lexical property and not a pure syntactic feature selected only in noun phrase production. We assume that grammatical gender selection is crucial in languages with a complex morphological structure, like Italian and Spanish, in which the ending vowel is itself marked for grammatical gender.

Keywords: Bare noun production; Grammatical gender; Lexical access; Picture-word paradigm; Speech production

ROUTLEDGE

Introduction to noun gender in French

2010-08-07T20:33:00.000-07:00

Excellent post about gender By Jon Vellner

[...] In English, a bee is a bee and a tree is a tree, but in French a tree is a he and a bee is a she.

This idea of all nouns having a gender is not unique to the French language, but it is certainly new to native speakers of English. Noun genders actually exist in most if not all European languages with the exception of English. In fact, you should count yourself lucky that French only has two genders, as some languages, like German and Russian for instance, have a third.

[...]Just because the sun is masculine in French, doesn't mean it has guy parts, and just because the moon is feminine doesn't mean it has "stay out of my way" days. It also doesn't imply anything about the hiddendeep down sexuality of a noun, like “ok, so the sun doesn't have guy parts... but he always wanted them, you know... he didn't ask to be born in this body, right?... oh, once he gets the money...”. I think that's far enough for the sexuality jokes... Hopefully that last paragraph was at least mildly amusing, and no more than mildly offensive. But, more importantly I hope I made my point sufficiently clear: “The gender of a noun has nothing to do with its shape, use, texture, colour, whether it pees standing up or sitting down, or even whether or not it likes Twilight.”

[...] Now, imagine a city divides all it's citizens into two groups. At first, there seems to be no apparent logic to their sorting. Religion? Race? Age? Sex? Social status? Marital status? Musical preference? Eye colour? IQ? I give up!
[...] In our imaginary scenario we were looking too hard. We assume that a city might divide people based on some kind of demographic.
[...] What a surprise when we find out that the two groups had actually been divided based on the last letter of their last name.

Traquer les pages dédiées au GENRE

2010-08-02T02:33:00.000-07:00

Leçons de grammaire : Le genre

Le Grimoire

Pascal Michelucci - University of Toronto

Beaucoup de choses intéressantes et beaucoup de travail accompli. Au total, trois pages en français consacrées au sujet réparties suivant les trois facteurs définissant les genres:

Le genre est réglé en français par trois facteurs :

-un facteur sémantique, défini par le sens

-un facteur orthographique, défini par la forme écrite

-un facteur acoustique, défini par la forme prononcée

Dans la première partie traitant du facteur sémantique, seuls les cas des êtres humains et des animaux sont référencés. Pas de distinction faites entre animaux proches de l'homme et les autres. Pourtant leur traitement respectif est bien différent (voir lien et lien). Il n'est pas fait mention des familles de noms sémantiquement liés comme les saisons, les points cardinaux, les arbres... (voir lien)

Dans la deuxième partie traitant du facteur orthographique, liste de terminaisons assez classique renvoyant cependant à des listes de mots complètes (gros travail). Cependant, là encore, aucune mention à la règle de base du genre marqué / non-marqué (voir lien) n'est faite.

Les terminaisons retenues sont:

Masculin (17 terminaisons):

-age, -isme, -teur, -oir, -or, -er, -ement, -iment, -ème, -eur, -ing, -eu, -il, -ail, -logue et -us

Féminin (19 terminaisons):

-ade, -tion, -trice, -oire, -ure, -eur, -euse, -eure, -ence, -ance, -ité, -auté, -aute, -ie, -ille, -elle, -aison, -tude

La troisième partie traitant du facteur acoustique est inachevée.

Noms masculins terminés par une voyelle prononcée (son /a/)

Noms féminins terminés par une consonne prononcée (son /a/+ consonne)

Tracking websites about GENDER

2010-08-02T01:28:00.000-07:00

So how do you know what the gender of a noun is?

By Language Center, College of Liberal Arts, University of Minnesota, USA

This is a good page about gender, though you will still find the same old chorus as anywhere else...

Very good point

"In fact it is not so much the objects or concepts themselves which have genders, but the words which describe them. This object, for example, can be either un vélo or une bicyclette."

Week points

The list of masculine and feminine endings is the usual type. As we say "why make it simple, when one can make it complex ?"

MASCULINE Endings:
Ending	Examples	Exception
-eau	le tableau	l'eau (f.), la peau
-age	le fromage	la page, une image, la cage, la plage, la nage, la rage
-isme	le communisme	--
-ment	le moment	la dent, la jument
-et	le poulet	la forêt
-oir	le couloir	--
-ail	le travail,	--

FEMININE Endings:
Ending	Examples	Exceptions
-tion	la nation	le bastion
-ance/ence	la distance,la patience	le silence
-té	la maternité	le côté, un été...
-ie	la vie	le parapluie, l'incendie
-ette	la recette	le squelette (skeleton)
-elle	la vaiselle	le mille...
-aison	la maison	--
-tude	une attitude	--
-ure	la nature	...
-esse	la jeunesse	--

Wouldn't it be simpler to present it this way:

Feminine nouns end with:
- final e,
- suffixes -ion/-aison, -ité and -eur(qualities)

(These 2 rules cover more than 90% of feminine nouns)

Masculine nouns end with
- no specific marker,
- suffixes -age, -isme, -aire and -oire
- endings -asme, -acle, -ome, -ème, -ège, -ile

(These 3 rules cover round about 80% of masculine nouns)

Familles de noms masculins

2010-08-01T01:48:00.000-07:00

L'allemand semble partager avec le français un grand nombre de familles de noms masculins : les points cardinaux, les saisons, les jours, les mois...

http://www.200words-a-day.com/masculine-gender.html

En français : http://genderfrenchnouns.yolasite.com/precedence-lexical.php

French language: The use of le, la and les

2010-07-27T03:22:00.000-07:00

by Ray COOK
LINK to the article

Good staff from this article

1. Nice remark about the Latin origin of French gender (Learn more about it)

If you are a Latin scholar it may be useful for you to know that 90% of French nouns retain their Latin gender and where Latin nouns were of the third gender, neuter, these have almost all become masculine in modern French.

2. Quite complete list of nouns groups (Learn more about it)

Masculine Nouns Groups

(colours, Days of the Week, Months, Seasons, Points of the compass, Languages, Definite male animals and people: l'homme, le chien (dog)(but la chienne for a bitch), le taureau (bull), Metals: le fer (iron), l'argent (silver)

Also the following are invariably masculine: Trees, shrubs, weights and measures.

Feminine Nouns Groups

(Definite female animals and people, The Arts, The Sciences)

Not so good staff

1. No mention of final e being a reliable feminine ending. Only briefly mentioned for countries and cities (Learn more about it)

The names of countries and cities ending in e are feminine: la France. But: le Canada and Paris are masculine. ?????

2. As expected no mention of -ion, -son and ité being feminine suffixes which explains why avion and poisson cannot be feminine (They don't derive from those suffixes) (learn more about it)

Gender Determination by Word Ending

Reliable Feminine endings are ion, -son, -té, tié. Common exceptions include: l'avion, le camion, le poisson.

Most eur endings which refer to a person are masculine, otherwise they are usually feminine (la fleur). But there are exceptions such as le Coeur (heart) which have to be learned.

Apart from the endings mentioned above nouns ending in a, e', i, o, u and y are masculine.

Ray COOK ends with a very optimistic statement:

If you learn these rules you will be correct most of the time.

Effect of grammatical gender on visual word recognition: Evidence from lexical decision and eye movement experiments

2010-07-27T03:07:00.000-07:00

PASCALE COLÉ, University of Savoie and C.N.R.S., Chambéry, France

JOËL PYNTE, C.N.R.S. and University of Provence, Provence, France

PASCALE ANDRIAMAMONJY, University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis, Nice, France

Perception & Psychophysics, 2003, 65 (3), 407-419

Lexical decision times and eye movements were recorded to determine whether grammatical gender can influence the visual recognition of isolated French nouns.

This issue was investigated by assessing the use of two types of regularities between a noun’s form and its gender—namely ending-to-gender regularities (e.g., the final letter sequence -at appears only in masculine nouns and, thus, is predictive of masculine gender) and gender-to-ending regularities (e.g., feminine gender would predict the final letter e, whereas masculine gender would not). Previous studies have shown that noun endings are used by readers when they have to identify gender.

However, the influence of ending-to-gender predictiveness has never been investigated in a lexical decision task, and the effect of gender-to-ending regularities has never been evaluated at all.

The results suggest that gender information can influence both the activation stage (Experiments 1 and 3) and the selection stage (Experiments 2 and 3) of the word recognition process.

Read more

Pluriel des noms en -ou

2010-07-16T23:27:00.000-07:00

Viens mon chou, mon bijou, mon joujou, sur mes genoux, et jette des cailloux à ce ripou de hibou plein de poux.

pour se souvenir des mots qui finissent en " ou" prennant un "x" au pluriel

QUOTHEQUE

Gender bla bla bla

2010-07-16T20:47:00.000-07:00

One more BLA BLA BLA article about gender in French!

THEY just keep on repeating themselves and others before them, over and over again ... Do THEY ever try to have a look at what is behind the fence or outside the box?

I'm so tired of those empty articles...that I decided to collect them.

The first website is LOVE TO KNOW FRENCH and the page is called Free French Noun Gender List. We are so lucky it is free!

In there, you will find a list of 6 endings presented as "Commun French Gender Rule"! and a list of 30 nouns (randomly presented) with the definite article.

Not a word about THE most important and real Gender Rule: marked nouns are feminine!

80% of all nouns are rule governed...Yes! I knew it !

2010-07-14T03:18:00.000-07:00

ROY LYSTER, McGill University, 2005

Predictability in French gender attribution: A corpus analysis

ABSTRACT

This article presents a corpus analysis designed to determine the extent to which noun endings in French are reliable predictors of grammatical gender.

A corpus of 9,961 nouns appearing in Le Robert Junior Illustr´e was analysed according to noun endings, which were operationalised as orthographic representations of rhymes, which consist of either a vowel sound (i.e., a nucleus) in the case of vocalic endings or a vowel-plus-consonant blend (i.e., a nucleus and a coda) in the case of consonantal endings.

The analysis classified noun endings as reliably masculine, reliably feminine, or ambiguous, by considering as reliable predictors of grammatical gender any noun ending that predicts the gender of least 90 per cent of all nouns in the corpus with that ending.

Results reveal that 81 per cent of all feminine nouns and 80 per cent of all masculine nouns in the corpus are rule governed, having endings that systematically predict their gender.

These findings, at odds with traditional grammars, are discussed in terms of their pedagogical implications.

the article

Gender attribution of foreign learners

2010-07-10T06:40:00.000-07:00

ARTICLE

Assignment of Grammatical Gender by Native Speakers and Foreign Learners of French.

Holmes, V. M.; de la Batie, B. Dejean

Applied Psycholinguistics, v20 n4 p479-506 Dec 1999

Compared the skill in gender attribution of foreign learners and native speakers of French. Accuracy and fluency of gender attribution by the foreign learners were assessed in spontaneous written production.

Comparative Analysis; French; Grammar; Language Fluency; Native Speakers; Nouns; Psycholinguistics; Second Language Learning; Written Language

Gender non-sens

2010-07-10T03:53:00.000-07:00

I wish I could answer Cenobite questions about the use of having genders in languages...

What one could venture to say is that a language reflects a specific culture and the vision of the surrounding world that its people have.

Through gender, we can see that English has a strong "human vs. non-human" vision of the environment. Humans are treated as very special entities in this environment (he/she vs. it). On one side, human beings and eventually some animals strongly connected to them, and on the other side, the rest of the universe (Not a very well balanced split).

Does knowing that English is "human-centered" tell us anything about how English speakers see the world or society? I wish I knew.

French splits the surrounding world into female and male entities disregarding their human or non-human nature or even their living or non-living nature. French applies to non-human entities the same rule it uses to differentiate men from women. (girls, ants, shoes and sciences all belong to the same female side). At least in French, the whole content of the Universe is split into two equal parts. What does that mean or tell us about French speakers vision of the world and society?

Could it be that there is a link between the linguistic and sociological vision of the outside world? Let's pretend there is...

English society is a communitarian society (foreigners are given the opportunity and even encouraged to live their foreign-way of life inside the Kingdom) where as French society is an integrative society (Foreigners are given the opportunity or, should I say, are strongly advised to live the French way and give up their foreign way of life on the French territory). On one side of the Channel, foreigners and locals live side by side but separate lives (English vs non-English), and on the other side of la Manche, foreigners are integrated, merged whether they like it or not, with the French, just like in the case of gender : humans, animals, things, concept, ideas...all mixed together as one, no as two : masculine and feminine.

This does not make much sense, right? In French we say: C'est tiré par les cheveux. Don't blame me. I told you from the start: Gender non-sens.

L'été

2010-07-10T03:16:00.000-07:00

By CENOBYTE

I was always fond of French nouns that began with a vowel, because then I didn’t have to remember the gender of the word. I suck at remembering the gender of words. I have a difficult enough time remembering the gender of some of the people I know, never mind nouns and articles. I think été is feminine.

Admittedly, that words can have gender is an aspect of language that has never made any sense to me. Partly because it’s so seemingly random (in French, the majority of nouns that end in the letter e are feminine in gender and the majority of nouns that do *not* end in e are masculine. In Polish, most feminine nouns end in a), and partly because I don’t understand the need for it. What makes a carpet masculine and a table feminine? Why are mice feminine (can the ’shrew’ comments here) and ceilings masculine? I mean, *why*? What’s the *point* of grammatical gender?

Dictionaries vs lexicon

2010-07-01T08:02:00.000-07:00

Another Bellows innovation was to print all the masculine French headwords in Roman font and the feminine ones in italics. Thus gender information was conveyed instantly, without need to look for an m. or f. label. But how is grammatical gender coded in the lexicon? I notice, for instance, that some French speakers, when asked whether a word is masculine or feminine, reply by associating it with the definite article: la dent, le fleuve. In other cases, words themselves have a ‘flavour’ that informs implicitly: for instance, that a word ending in the sound -sion is feminine.

http://unprofessionaltranslation.blogspot.com/

Le dictionnaire français-anglais de John Bellows (1831-1902)

Carte des pays masculins et féminins

2010-06-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Carte wikipédia montrant les pays selon leur genre masculin ou féminin en français.

Le continent américain est très masculin alors que les pays d'Europe et d'Asie sont majoritairement féminins.

L'Inde et la Thaïlande sont entourées de pays masculins depuis que la Birmanie est devenue le Myanmar.

Le ou La? : Gender of French Nouns

2010-06-14T01:39:00.000-07:00

by Marie Surridge

ISBN 13: 9781853592683

ISBN 10: 1853592684

Paperback

United Kingdom: Multilingual Matters, 1995

Pages: 96
Weight: 5 ounces
Size: 8.3 x 5.3 x 0.3 inches

Le ou La? : Gender of French Nouns

How did genders and cases develop in IndoEuropean?

2010-05-31T06:30:00.000-07:00

[--Mikael Thompson]

Frequently asked questions about linguistics

Early stages of proto-Indo-European (PIE) didn't have feminine gender. This is attested in Hittite, the oldest recorded IE language; it had only masculine and neuter genders, divided basically between animate and inanimate objects. For most noun classes the PIE endings can be reconstructed as follows:

Animate Inanimate
Subject *-s *-0
Object *-m *-0

For animate nouns, *-s indicated the source of action, *-m the thing acted upon; the zero ending indicates no syntactic role. The basic idea is that only living things can act upon other things, so only animate nouns could take the *-s.

Such a system is characteristic of active/stative languages. Other features of PIE fit in with this observation; for instance, in PIE objects like fire and water which are inanimate but move seemingly of their own will have two separate names. In many languages with an active-stative distinction there are such pairs of words. As this distinction was lost in IE, different branches retained just one of the words: e.g. English water, Greek hydor, Hittite watarform one group (from PIE *wed-), while Latin aqua is from PIE *akwa:-.

The animate nouns are the historical source for the masculine gender, and the inanimate nouns for the neuter. This is why in all the classic IE languages the neuter nominative and accusative have identical forms, and the only basic difference between masculine and neuter nouns is in the accusative.

Earlier historical linguists cheerfully reconstructed eight cases for PIE, on the model of Sanskrit; but the IE languages with many cases are now considered to be innovative, not conservative. The other cases developed from postpositions or derivational suffixes. Luwian, a sister language of Hittite, for instance, has no genitive, but has an adjective-forming suffix -assi, as in harmah-assi-s 'of the head'. (This is an adjective, not a genitive, because it can be declined.) Genitives in other languages often seem to be developments of cognates to this suffix.

PIE didn't bother much with specifying plurals, but when it did, it added an *-s or other endings. The neuter plural in all IE languages is not descended from this, however-- active/stative languages typically don't mark plurals for inanimate nouns-- but is instead a collective noun, treated grammatically as a singular. This collective noun ended in *-a in the nominative and accusative, and eventually it developed into the feminine, which in all the old IE languages has the same form in the nominative singular as does the neuter plural nominative- accusative. It is also why the Greek neuter plural took a singular verb.

The reason it is called the feminine, of course, is that nouns indicating females fell in this gender most of the time. This is puzzling, and probably we must accept it as a fact whose explanation can't be recovered from the depths of time.

Native speakers don't know the genders of French nouns!

2010-05-19T07:22:00.000-07:00

LANGUAGE LOG

YOU SAY FEMININE, I SAY MASCULINE...

February 25, 2008

Last week, Dalila Ayoun, of the Department of French and Italian here at the University of Arizona, gave a talk in our linguistics colloquium series in which she dropped a bombshell: native French speakers don't know the genders of French nouns!

OK, that's not quite right: it would be more appropriate to say that native French speakers don't agree on the genders of French nouns. They really don't agree. Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns. READ MORE

Genre grammatical en français : bibliographie

2010-05-19T06:46:00.000-07:00

Dalila Ayoun
Professor of French Linguistics and SLAT, University of Arizona

My research interests lie in the second language acquisition of syntax-morphology (tense-aspect-mood/modality, grammatical gender) and French linguistics from a generative/minimalist perspective. I am particularly interested in the psycholinguistic processes which underlie the acquisition of languages past the age of puberty, as well as web-based and computerized experimental research. BIBLIOGRAPHIE

Ayoun, D. (2007). The acquisition of grammatical gender in L2 French. In D. Ayoun (ed.), French Applied Linguistics, pp. 130-170. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins.

Selected Conferences

"A corpus analysis of French grammatical gender in context". EuroSLA, September 2-5, 2009, Cork, Ireland. Accepted submission.

"The (in)stability of grammatical gender assignment and agreement among French native speakers". AAAL, March 21-24, 2009, Denver. Accepted submission.

“The acquisition of future expression by L2 French instructed learners”. Romance Turn Workshop II, University of Utrecht, September 7-9, 2006. Accepted submission.

“Grammatical gender and agreement in L2 French: A minimalist approach”. PacSLRF, Brisbane, July 6-8, 2006. Accepted submission.

Loss of Gender in English

2010-05-15T20:58:00.000-07:00

Dave Wilton, Thursday, May 13, 2010

Unlike most other Indo-European languages, English, for the most part, doesn’t have grammatical genders (i.e., inflecting nouns, pronouns, and adjectives as either masculine, feminine, or neuter). French, for example, has two genders (m. and f.); German has three. But the only English words that are inflected for gender are the third-person, singular pronouns (he, she, it), and the gender of these, with a few exceptions, corresponds to biological gender of the referent. (The primary exceptions are personification of inanimate objects, such as referring to ships or one’s country asshe, and the use of it to refer to animals where the sex is not known or immaterial.) But English was not always like this. wordorigins.org

Genre des composés en -sphère

2010-05-14T21:46:00.000-07:00

Les composés savants en -sphère avec une ligature en -o- (Grec) sont féminins à l’image de leur base sphère f. qui signifie ici couche sphérique / enveloppe / espace ou ensemble de...

atmOsphère f. - couche gazeuse chargée de vapeur qui entoure le globe terrestre

tropOsphère f. - couche de l'atmosphère terrestre dans laquelle la température décroît assez régulièrement avec l'altitude.

stratOsphère f. - couche de l'atmosphère située entre la troposphère (6 à 17 km d'altitude) et la mésosphère (50 km d'altitude).

mésOsphère f. - couche de l'atmosphère au-delà de la stratosphère.

thermOsphère f. - couche atmosphérique où la température croît continuellement avec l'altitude.

homOsphère f. - couche de l'atmosphère à composition presque constante

hétérOsphère f. - couche de l'atmosphère à composition variable

ionOsphère f. - couche de l'atmosphère dans laquelle ions et électrons ont une densité suffisante pour réfléchir les ondes électromagnétiques

exOsphère f. - couche atmosphérique ou les atomes légers s'évadent vers l'espace interplanétaire (Larousse)

photOsphère f. - couche extérieure d'une étoile qui fournit la majeure partie du rayonnement lumineux et calorique

lithOsphère f. - enveloppe rocheuse constituant la croûte terrestre

magnétOsphère f. - couche terrestre qui concentre son champ magnétique

biOsphère f. - couche géochimique constituée par la masse organique des êtres vivants

blogOsphère f. - ensemble des blogs et/ou des blogueurs.

noOsphère f. - ensemble des consciences humaines et de leurs pensées.

Hémisphère et planisphère sont eux masculins. Leurs deux membres sont reliés par un -i- (Latin). Leur base sphère prend alors le sens de GLOBE m. et non pas de COUCHE f. sphérique.

hémisphère m. - moitié du Globe ou du cerveau - du latin hēmisphaerĭum, ĭi, n.

planisphère m. - représentation plane du Globe ou du Ciel – construit sur le modèle de hémisphère

Voir site Mauvais Genre

CNRTL / Prima-elementa / Wiktionnaire

1000 visiteurs

2010-05-12T08:54:00.000-07:00

Le site MAUVAIS GENRE dépasse les 1000 visiteurs !

A propos du mot GENRE...

2010-05-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

Dictionnaire participatif francophone

Site MAUVAIS GENRE accepté comme lien externe.

Le genre des rimes

2010-05-10T02:18:00.000-07:00

Dictionnaire inversé

Attention ! Le genre des rimes n'a rien à voir avec le genre grammatical !

Ce qui est difficile, dans la question du genre des rimes, c'est qu'il s'agit de "rimes" visuelles ; ce sont des "lois" purement graphiques. Le terme "rime" est trompeur, car on s'attend à ce que cette loi porte sur un son, sur quelque chose que l'on entend. LIRE

Suffixes et genres : cas du suffixe féminin -aison

2010-05-07T00:42:00.001-07:00

Ce suffixe fait partie des 3 suffixes féminins français non marqués d'un –e final (-ion ou -(a)ison; -eur ; -ité) Ces suffixes n'agissent pas sur le sens de la base, ils la nominalisent (Transformation morphologique).

Il n’est plus guère productif et a été remplacé par la forme -ion

Ses dérivés sont soit des emprunts directs au latin comme maison soit construits sur un verbe : livraison ou un nom : siglaison

Ses autres formes sont : -ion (division, formation, région) , (-i)son (trahison, chanson, cuisson) et -on derrière un C (leçon, rançon, façon)

Cette famille de dérivés admet 3 exceptions : soupçon m. - poison m. - frisson m., doublets masculins respectifs de suspicion f., potion f. et friction f.

ATTENTION à ne pas confondre les dérivés du suffixe -(ai)son avec ceux du suffixe masculin -on désignant des objets : glaçon,chausson...

MAUVAIS GENRE : Dérogation à la règle des genres 1

Orthographe, seul nom féminin de la famille

2010-05-05T20:50:00.000-07:00

Les noms savants composés de la racine grecque γράφειν graphein «écrire, décrire» sont masculins du fait de leur forme verbale d'origine : (inanimés) phonographe, cinématographe, autographe, paragraphe, stylographe, oscillographe; (animés) océanographe, chorégraphe, photographe, ethnographe...

Orthographe, seul nom féminin de la famille des composés savants en GRAPHE, est en concurrence avec le doublet orthographie, terme d'architecture (profil d'un bâtiment). Ces deux substantifs féminins résultent du même terme latin
orthŏgrăphĭa, ae, f.
, lui même emprunté au grec ορθογραφία, ayant également ces deux sens;

ortografie avec le sens de «manière d'écrire correcte» est attestée dès 1245, et sa forme moderne orthographe est attestée en 1529.

orthographie, terme d'architecture, est attesté depuis 1547.

Mauvais genre

Centre nationale de ressources textuelles et lexicales

Prima elementa