I was recently writing an email in french describing a website, as a noun it should be either a “masculin” or “feminin”. Which is it and who gets to decide?
Marc
I was recently writing an email in french describing a website, as a noun it should be either a “masculin” or “feminin”. Which is it and who gets to decide?
Marc
“Website” and its abbreviated form “site” are masculine nouns in French.
Whether a noun is masculine or feminine is usually determined by its sound or its morphology. For example, all nouns ending in “-tion” are feminine. After some time, you get a feel for whether a noun should be masculine or feminine.
That’s the short story. I’m sure others will have more to add.
This probably applies to most inflected languages – certainly in Latin and Russian, the other two I’ve studied besides French. Masculine/feminine/neuter are just convenient ways of categorizing words by sound or form, and usually have nothing to do with any perceived “gender” of the noun in question. Some of these categorizations carry over from Latin into English; for instance, because the Latin word for ship (navis) is feminine, we still speak of ships in terms of “she/her”, rather than “it” – at least poetically.
And although you might think that words which are used to describe human beings would be classed according to gender, this isn’t always the case either. In Latin, the words for sailor (nauta) and farmer (agricola) belong to a group of nouns ending in -a, all of which are considered feminine.
In Spanish most nouns ended in O are masculine and most nouns ended in A are feminine, even if the meaning would suggest otherwise. “Persona” (person) is feminine and no one has a problem using feminine when talking about a (man) person.
I don’t quite understand those feminists that go into fits over the English language being sexist etc. It is just a way of speaking for goodness sake.
Espia (spy), Camarada (comrade) used to be feminine but eventually changed and are now used as masculine (just to confuse those trying to learn Spanish).
I think that the reason some might consider English “sexist” is precisely because we don’t have M/F/N nouns. We don’t learn to decouple the concept of human gender from word forms.
Although you have to wonder: who decided to categorize nouns as masculine/feminine/neuter? Why not red/blue/green? Good/bad/indifferent? Small/medium/large?
Sounds like a Straight Dope mailbag question…
Not exactly, on the Latin. Agricola and nauta (and poeta and a few others) are first-declension nouns, which are mostly feminine, and decline in the same manner, but they’re still considered masculine nouns. If you’re fitting an adjective to the noun, the agreement is based on gender, not on declension, so, for instance, a “good farmer” would be “bonus agricola”, not “bona agricola”.
… you’re right, Chronos. It’s been a while.
So I guess my point should have been: morphology often indicates whether a noun is M/F/N, but not always.
Sic transit gloria mundi. (But it’s Wednesday isn’t it?)
I asked this before, somewhere, but could someone explain
again? Why is it that in both Romance and Germanic, the word for Hand seems to be anomalous? In general it looks
like it ought to be masculine, but is feminine. French
has “la main”, Italian and Spanish both have “la mano”.
German has “die Hand”. Actually since German retains the neuter gender, it would be more accurate to say the word looks like a neuter. In German, neuters and masculines
behave and look somewhat similarly. They generally do not
end in -e, and are without any of the specific features which dictate a feminine ending, such as ending in -und.
Plurals tend to be formed by umlauting (i.e., a change of the principal vowel, like goose-geese). So the plural of
“die Hand” is “die Haende”, again more like a masculine or
neuter than a feminine.
Someone explained to me that Manus, in Latin, belongs to a
very small declension of nouns, and this accounts for its odd behavior. But since the same situation exists in German, the origins must go farther back.
Now I really wish I had my Latin dictionary with me today. Y’know, it figures, the one day I leave it at home…
The Latin dictionary I found on-line indicates that javaman is correct: “manus” belongs to the 4th declension – which is relatively small compared to the 1st through 3rd – and that it is feminine. Chronos will have to help me out here, but I recall that most 4th declension nouns are masculine or neuter. So “manus” is odd, in the same way that “nauta” and “agricola” are atypical for the 1st declension.
I would go all the way. Why do we even need gender? I mean even for people. Chinese does not have it. Does Esperanto? IMHO it is unnecessary.
Except for trees. e.g. quercus, oak, is feminine.
4th and 5th declension nouns are screwy IME and some of them have unique endings depending on the case. SOme do not HAVE endings for some cases. And of course I can’t think of any now, but as it’s been close to three years since I did any real Latin, I’m allowed to forget.
There are certain endings in French that take the feminine and some that take masculine. -que and -tion usually take la and elle, with the exception of (at least) le Mexique.
Near as I can figure, words like la mano in Spanish and Italian are irregular because they were neuter in Latin and the languages derived from Latin don’t use neuter gender for nouns.
And compare these.
“Head” is:
…masculine in German (der Kopf).
…feminine in Greek (e kephale).
…neuter in Latin (caput)
In Russian:
…Monday, Tuesday, Thursday (poniedel’nik, vtornik, chetvierg) are masculine.
…Wednesday, Friday, Saturday (sreda, piatnitsa, subbota) are feminine.
…Sunday (voskresenie) is neuter.
In German:
…“spoon” is masculine (der Löffel).
…“fork” is feminine (die Gabel).
…“knife” is neuter (das Messer).
With this in mind I’d say there is no rhyme or reason to grammatical gender whatever. Heck, a “suitcase” is masculine in German but a “girl” is neuter!