# Using the wrong gender for a noun **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [September 12, 2003, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206 "2003-09-12T14:49:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![SmackFu](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/53a042/32.png) [@SmackFu](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SmackFu)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 2:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/1 "2003-09-12T14:49:18Z")
In the foreign languages that assign gender to nouns, how is it perceived by fluent speakers when someone uses the wrong one? ---
**Author:** ![CookingWithGas](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/cookingwithgas/32/485_2.png) [@CookingWithGas](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CookingWithGas)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/2 "2003-09-12T15:04:03Z")
Imagine hearing a non-native English speaker referring to a male person as “her” and you have the idea. ---
**Author:** ![DarrenS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 3:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/3 "2003-09-12T15:18:30Z")
Anecdotal answer here. When I was just learning French, I happened to use “la telephone” (it should be “le”). A native speaker told me it sounded cute - like something she would expect a child to say. She also said that native speakers, if in doubt, would use “le” by default, so not knowing _and_ picking the wrong “default” sounded doubly naive and cute. ---
**Author:** ![missbunny](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/76d3ee/32.png) [@missbunny](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/missbunny)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 3:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/4 "2003-09-12T15:30:10Z")
Not even the native speakers always get the gender right. It’s not that big of a deal to make that mistake sometimes. Much like fluent English speakers make grammatical errors all the time and it’s usually not something anyone else is going to howl over. Although I am sure if you NEVER got any genders right, you would be perceived as rather stupid. ---
**Author:** ![Mops](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mops/32/16494_2.png) [@Mops](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mops)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 4:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/5 "2003-09-12T16:33:10Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by CookingWithGas \* > \*\*Imagine hearing a non-native English speaker referring to a male person as “her” and you have the idea. \*\* Not really that serious. Such errors obviously involve nouns for inanimate objects and animals, where grammatical gender is assigned pretty arbitrarily in languages like French and German. It is very seldom a barrier in understanding. Also someone who makes this kind of grammatical mistakes will also have a noticeable accent, so people know to make allowances for a non-native speaker. Not a big deal, in other words. When I hear French people speking German there tend to be these characteristic gender mismatches due to the French language having male/female grammatical genders, and German male/female/neuter - you just mentally insert the correct gender and that’s that. If the French person would be unfortunate enough not to speak in a French accent I’d perceive that quite differently. ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 5:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/6 "2003-09-12T17:01:15Z")
French is full of gender pitfalls, and seems quite arbitrary, unlike Spanish or Portuguese. If a Spanish or Portuguese language ends in ‘o’, it’s male and the article is also male (‘el’ or ‘o’), if in ‘a’, then female (‘la’ or ‘a’). French has few indicators to tell you, but you tend to get a ‘feel’ for whether or not something is male or female after speaking the language for awhile. Exposure is the best teacher, of course. ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 5:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/7 "2003-09-12T17:24:50Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Chefguy \* > \*\*If a Spanish or Portuguese language ends in ‘o’, it’s male and the article is also male (‘el’ or ‘o’), if in ‘a’, then female (‘la’ or ‘a’). \*\* With some exceptions, of course. La mano, el día, el programa, etc. But it’s much easier to tell than in French. It should be mentioned that using a different article can change the meaning. My favorite is: La papa = the potato. El Papa = the Pope. In this case there is the possibility of some rather comical misunderstandings. Also: El policía = the policeman La policía = the police force (or, nowadays, police woman) El guía = the guide (male person) La guía = the guidebook, female guide ---
**Author:** ![DarrenS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/977dab/32.png) [@DarrenS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DarrenS)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 5:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/8 "2003-09-12T17:26:29Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Chefguy \* > \*\*French is full of gender pitfalls, and seems quite arbitrary, unlike Spanish or Portuguese. If a Spanish or Portuguese language ends in ‘o’, it’s male and the article is also male (‘el’ or ‘o’), if in ‘a’, then female (‘la’ or ‘a’). \*\* Except for “el agua” (feminine, but takes “el” for the sound), “el alma” (ditto), el día (masculine ending in “a”), la mano (feminine ending in “o”). There are probably plenty of others that I can’t think of right now. I take the point about French genders being less easy to “guess”, though. (Boy is that one open for snappy comebacks…) ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 9:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/9 "2003-09-12T21:09:46Z")
\ Just what is the point of this gender thing at all? Why do these antiquated languages have it? English seems to get along fine without it. (Now if we could only do something about English spelling…) \ ---
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [September 12, 2003, 10:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/10 "2003-09-12T22:15:21Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Colibri \* > \*\*With some exceptions, of course. La mano, el día, el programa, etc. But it’s much easier to tell than in French. > > It should be mentioned that using a different article can change the meaning. My favorite is: > > La papa = the potato. > El Papa = the Pope. > > In this case there is the possibility of some rather comical misunderstandings. > > Also: > > El policía = the policeman > La policía = the police force (or, nowadays, police woman) > > El guía = the guide (male person) > La guía = the guidebook, female guide \*\* Right…meant to type “generally” as a qualifier. Thanks for the clarification. ---
**Author:** ![Hanayatori](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8baadc/32.png) [@Hanayatori](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hanayatori)\ **Post date:** [September 13, 2003, 5:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/11 "2003-09-13T05:04:42Z")
Perhaps it would be helpful to think of gender not in terms of how we commonly use it, to mean sex, but rather as a linguistic term which refers to how nouns are partitioned into various classes. Some languages divide nouns into masculine, feminine, and neuter, other languages divide nouns into animate and inanimate. Swahili divides nouns into seven genders, including people, animals, and abstract nouns. ---
**Author:** ![Vriggs](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/v/a4c791/32.png) [@Vriggs](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Vriggs)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 3:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/12 "2003-09-14T03:31:07Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by [t-bonham@scc.net](mailto:t-bonham@scc.net) \* > \*\*\ > Just what is the point of this gender thing at all? Why do these antiquated languages have it? > > English seems to get along fine without it. (Now if we could only do something about English spelling…) > \ \*\* It’s a hijack but a good question… it would seem to make sense logically to a native english speaker that masculin/feminine should be assigned only to living things (people, animals). But because we often think in the same language we speak maybe the problem is how we look at it… maybe to a native french speaker there _is_ something feminine about a house etc… makes you wonder that when we speak about something perhaps we are thinking about it differently. ---
**Author:** ![David\_Simmons](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/9de053/32.png) [@David\_Simmons](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/David_Simmons)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 5:24am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/13 "2003-09-14T05:24:46Z")
I only had one year of Russian but I do remember this. Russian has 3 genders, masc, fem and neut. It also has 6 noun cases. An adjective has to agree with its noun in number, gender and case so there are 36 possible forms of an adjective. And most of the common adjectives are irregular. I’ve heard native speakers of Russian say that when in doubt about the ending of a noun or adjective they “swallow” the ending, or cough at an opportune time, and they do a lot of “swallowing” and coughing. Any expert Russian speakers around? ---
**Author:** ![Roches](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/bc8723/32.png) [@Roches](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roches)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 7:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/14 "2003-09-14T07:30:25Z")
The genders of nouns in Romance languages are usually, but not always, the same as the gender of the Latin noun from which they are derived. Since it is generally possible to determine the gender of a Latin noun by its declension, it is possible to predict the gender of a noun in a Romance language if you know it in Latin. This is the only way I found it possible to remember genders in French, and probably one of the few practical uses of knowing Latin. You can’t _always_ predict gender from Latin nouns. Interestingly, though, the Romance languages, which are derived from Vulgar Latin, do not always use the same noun as classical Latin. This might suggest that Vulgar Latin speakers found gender to be confusing, and chose to reduce its importance by replacing those words where gender is hard to determine with easier ones. (An example is the word for ‘head’, which is ‘tête’ in French and ‘caput, capitis’ in Latin. _Tête_ is derived from _testa_ ‘pot’, which is clearly feminine.) Latin also had a neuter gender, which is not present in the Romance languages. Neuter nouns almost always became masculine. Assigning gender to inanimate objects is generally a property of Indo-European languages, and it is present in most of them, as well as many other languages. (Gender is not, as far as I know, consistent across Indo-European languages.) English is an exception. All nouns in Old English, however, _did_ have gender. I’ve read that one reason Middle and modern English do not have gender is that native Germanic-descended words in English often had a different gender than the French words that were being borrowed into English after the Norman invasion. Speakers would have been faced with a choice of words to describe an object, and those words would often have had different gender. Over time, English speakers stopped assigning gender to inanimate objects. (There remain a few examples of inanimate objects which are assigned gender; all of the ones I can think of are feminine, though, strangely, ships in Old English were masculine.) Anyway, French genders are _somewhat_ predictable, though less so than Spanish or Latin. German, and probably Russian, genders seem basically impossible to predict. From my understanding, though, native speakers learn genders much the same way foreign speakers do: when they learn new words, they learn the appropriate article with them. I wonder, though, what the ‘default’ gender is in languages other than French; for example, if you don’t know the gender of a German noun, do you guess that it’s masculine, feminine, or neuter? ---
**Author:** ![Hanayatori](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/8baadc/32.png) [@Hanayatori](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hanayatori)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 7:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/15 "2003-09-14T07:57:57Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Roches \* > \*\*(An example is the word for ‘head’, which is ‘tête’ in French and ‘caput, capitis’ in Latin. _Tête_ is derived from _testa_ ‘pot’, which is clearly feminine.) Latin also had a neuter gender, which is not present in the Romance languages. Neuter nouns almost always became masculine. \*\* Romanian still has a neuter gender. “Head” in Romanian is “cap”, which is neuter. Is the Latin “caput” neuter as well? I’m curious to know if there is still a correspondence in gender. ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 10:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/16 "2003-09-14T10:58:28Z")
Other Spanish words: espía, camarada, puente, mar. I was taught in Spanish there are five genders: masculino, femenino, neutro, epiceno & ambiguo. Ambiguo: el mar, la mar, el puente, la puente. Espía, camarada used to be feminine, then ambiguous but are now almost exclusively masculine. Epiceno: Género de los nombres de animales que con una misma terminación y artículo designan al macho y a la hembra: el jilguero, la codorniz. ---
**Author:** ![Eva\_Luna](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/e495f1/32.png) [@Eva\_Luna](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Eva_Luna)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 3:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/17 "2003-09-14T15:20:44Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by David Simmons \* > \*\*I only had one year of Russian but I do remember this. Russian has 3 genders, masc, fem and neut. It also has 6 noun cases. An adjective has to agree with its noun in number, gender and case so there are 36 possible forms of an adjective. And most of the common adjectives are irregular. > > I’ve heard native speakers of Russian say that when in doubt about the ending of a noun or adjective they “swallow” the ending, or cough at an opportune time, and they do a lot of “swallowing” and coughing. > > Any expert Russian speakers around? \*\* I’ve observed the same, particularly with various plurals. Plurals for quantities of 5 and above take the genitive case in most situations, and there are lots of irregulars. Most native speakers don’t know them all, so they either rearrange the sentence to avoid having to figure out the genitive plural, or they just use the nominative plural even though they know it’s wrong, or they fudge the whole thing and swallow the word ending. My first-year Russian teacher told us that was how you knew a spy; they knew stuff like that that native speakers don’t even know. And you think Russian is fun? My ex-boyfriend was a native speaker of Tabasaran, an indigenous North Caucasian language spoken by about 100,000 people. He told me Tabasaran has 36! cases! plus three genders. I was stunned. “Do you really know all that grammar?” (I later discovered that Tabasaran is only taught in schools in Russia until 2nd grade, and mostly as a means of maintreaming kids into Russian-language education, so the odds of ANYONE but a professional linguist having made a formal study of Tabasaran grammar were pretty low.) “Hell no,” he said, “I just speak it.” In French, I found it immensely helpful to have learned Spanish first, because nouns generally have the same gender in French that they do in Spanish. **sailor,** my HS Spanish teachers always told us that certain Spanish words derived from other languages (usually Greek or Arabic) were masculine because they were masculine in their language of origin (el periodista springs to mind, but my crummy dictionary doesn’t have any etymology information, so I can’t check myself, but I seem to remember most words ending in -ema or -ista falling into this category). Have you heard the same? If so, whichof your categories would this fall into? ---
**Author:** ![Noone\_Special](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/noone_special/32/2863_2.png) [@Noone\_Special](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Noone_Special)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 4:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/18 "2003-09-14T16:00:38Z")
Hebrew is “cute” in that it has two forms of plural. A nominally “masculine” suffix (-im) and a nominally “feminine” suffix (-ot). This should make figuring out gender a snap, right? well, no. Becasue the Key Word here is - “nominally” ☹ The number of maculine nouns ending in “-ot” (and feminine ending in “-im”) is, while probably still a minority, far too large too ignore. Oh, and counting numbers have gender, too. And masculine counting numbers from 3-10 “look” and “sound” feminine. :smack: BTW, Hebrew is semitic, NOT Indo-European, so evidently the “gender=sex” thing in languages is wider than just Indo-European. ---
**Author:** ![sailor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a587f6/32.png) [@sailor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/sailor)\ **Post date:** [September 14, 2003, 10:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/19 "2003-09-14T22:59:56Z")
> [@](#): > > \*Originally posted by Eva Luna \* > **sailor,** my HS Spanish teachers always told us that certain Spanish words derived from other languages (usually Greek or Arabic) were masculine because they were masculine in their language of origin (el periodista springs to mind, but my crummy dictionary doesn’t have any etymology information, so I can’t check myself, but I seem to remember most words ending in -ema or -ista falling into this category). Have you heard the same? If so, whichof your categories would this fall into? Sounds like totally bogus to me. -ista is a common ending for making an “adjectival noun” (I have no idea if such a concept exists but if it doesn’t then I just made it up). What I mean is that it is a common way of naming the person by his activity or profesion. Flautista = person who plays the flute. Futbolista = person who plays football. Periodista = persona que trabaja para un periódico. etc.Those words are not masculine, they are not feminine, they are not neutral. . . they are the one gender I forgot in my list before: género común. They are masculine or feminine depending on the article. El periodista (the male reporter), la periodista (the female reporter). Those words cannot derive their gender from any other language for the simple reason that they do not derive from any other languge, they derive from an already Spanish noun. The do not come directly from any other language. I looked up “periodista” and it appears in the late 19th century with other related words like “periodismo” deriving from “periódico” which appeared in the early 18th century as an adjective used first in astronomy and meaning periodical and then became a noun meaning “a periodical publication”. The first Spanish word of this series is “período”, derived from Greek, and meaning “revolution of a planet” from where the meaning “repetitive” came to be. As you can see “periodista” does not derive from any other language. But, where does the suffix “-ista” comes from? It is similar to the suffix “-ist” in English (pianist, flutist, linguist). > [@](#): > > [http://www.bartleby.com/64/pages/page248.html](http://www.bartleby.com/64/pages/page248.html) > The suffix -ist, which comes from the Greek suffix -istes, forms agent nouns, that is, nouns that denote someone who does something. Although -ist frequently forms agent nouns from verbs ending in -ize or nouns ending in -ism, it has also come to be combined with words that do not end in -ize or -ism. In fact in some cases -ist can be used much like the suffix -er. In pairs such as conformer/conformist, copier/copyist, and cycler/cyclist, -ist and -er may be used interchangeably. Just to correct my list: In Spanish, nouns can be of any of six genders: masculino, femenino, neutro, común, epiceno, ambiguo. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [September 15, 2003, 12:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206/20 "2003-09-15T00:06:56Z")
All this discussion here about how many genders (3, 5, 7, 36?) or about how “to predict” the gender assigned in a specific language, or about how gender was “dropped” in certain languages just reinforces my point: _this whole concept of gender in languages is antiquated, superfluous, and unneeded._ I’m glad to see that these languages are mostly dying out. I wonder if that is a result of such baroque and functionally unnecessary structures in the language, or just circumstantial? [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/using-the-wrong-gender-for-a-noun/201206.md?page=2)