So, in English, all names have an “assigned” gender that must be memorized with the name as you memorize it. In English, pronouns, nouns, and adjectives reflect the gender of the object to which they refer. The Policeman is therefore a policeman; the police officer is a police officer. The language has no neutral grammatical gender. And there are many names (including those related to professions) that don`t have female versions. Thus, a male minister is the minister and a female minister is the minister. In addition, French students learn that “the masculine dominates over the feminine”,” which means that if you have a room full of ten women and one man, you must describe the whole group in the masculine. This is the most common way to change adjectives based on gender and quantity. This can be the most effective way to determine the gender of a name if you are lost. Sure, the best way to remember the genre is when you learn the name, but hey, no one is perfect.

Do you have a conversation? They need agreements on gender. Refresh vocabulary? Learn more about the genres of names. In fact, if you want to immerse yourself in French, then you need to know your le de la (some articles) and your one of your one (indefinite articles). Feminists who believe that these characteristics of French disadvantage women`s language disagree on the best way to fix them. Most recommend creating female versions of all professional names and/or using neutral names whenever possible. Many also recommend a grammatical tool, which involves adding a “middle period” to the end of male nouns, followed by the feminine ending, which displays the two gendered versions of each noun (as musicians, which would be read as “male musicians and female musicians”). Some have even recommended creating a neutral pronoun (the equivalent of how “they” is sometimes used in English or “hen” in Sweden). These and other recommendations are collectively known as “inclusive writing.” Never learn from a list of French words that doesn`t contain information about gender, you`d be missing half the information! (Be careful, the Internet is unfortunately full of such lists…) For example: my table – my table, this table – this table, source table? which table? Etc. These words not only carry the terms “mon”, “ceci” and “qui”, but they also carry the number and sex in French. If you use being as an auxiliary verb in the perfect form and other composite tenses (such as past perfection and past condition), you need to make an agreement with your subject. Usually, it`s simple because the subject is either I, you, he, she, us, you, they or them.

If a name is your subject, make sure you`re sure of their gender so you can make the right arrangements. Although there are few fixed rules for recognizing the gender of French names, some patterns and trends can be represented. They are a bit painful because they change depending on the number and gender of the name, but sometimes also depending on other factors, such as French possessive additives. Now that you understand the grammatical terms gender and number, you can answer a typical French language course question: “What is the number and sex of this French word?” When French publisher Hatier published an “inclusive” textbook for third-grade children in September this year, it was based on the 2015 recommendations of the High Council for Gender Equality, which outlined 10 ways to make French language more gender-neutral. Major conservative publications have published editorials and editorials with titles such as “Feminism: The Delirium of Inclusive Writing” or “Inclusive Writing: The New Factory for Idiots.” Many philosophers and academics strongly opposed what they saw as feminist activism disguised as linguistics – and using children as guinea pigs. Emmanuelle de Riberolles, a literature teacher in the French region of Picardy, argued that “children should not be drawn into struggles that do not affect them.” Even education minister Jean-Michel Blanquer has spoken out against inclusive writing, declaring that “language is a foundation of life that we owe to children” and that it “must not be instrumentalized, even for the best purposes.” An earlier study titled “Does Language Shape Our Economy? Female/Male Grammatical Distinctions and Gender Economics” proposed a link between gendered languages and women`s employment rates. It turned out that a gendered grammar system is associated with a lower participation rate of women than countries without gender-specific languages. But this topic is still on the fringes of cognitive science and linguistic research, and critics of inclusive writing say not enough work has been done to conclusively prove that changing a language will improve gender equality.

Then there are adjectives, which have different spellings or pronunciations depending on the gender of the noun to which you apply them. And of course, for you connoisseurs of time travel, there are the gender chords that can be found in the perfect form and all its grammatically derived compound times. Understanding grammatical terms like “gender” and “number” is not so obvious and often the reason why French-speaking students don`t understand French grammar. In France, this debate dates back to World War I, when men went to war and left women behind to occupy traditionally male-dominated positions such as chimney sweeps or factory workers. The names, which related to those professions that previously had only male versions, developed feminine, to the great horror of French society at the time. But what was tolerable in wartime became unacceptable when men returned from the battlefield, and the question of how to make French gender-neutral was set aside until the 1970s and 80s. Efforts at the government level to study the possible feminization of French people began in 1984 and continued until the end of the 20th century, but all proposals were rejected by the institutions that control the codification of the language. If it is a living being, sex is determined by gender: female or male. A will be a woman. A male male dog. Again, no neutral in French, so all living beings too. well everything.

is a man or a woman. So blame your caveman ancestors for the extra work. English, which emerged from PIE after a long saga of evolution, has come to abandon grammatical gender. The French have only abandoned the neutral gender, and here we are. Five types of impersonal pronouns (demonstrative, indefinite, interrogative, negative, and possessive) must correspond to the nouns they replace with gender and number. Proponents of linguistic determinism argue that your language determines and limits what you can think. Linguistic determinism is the strong taste of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis – the idea that your language influences the way you think. This hypothesis was popular in the 1940s, but was considered false by the linguistic community in the 60s and 70s. “Languages differ considerably in what they have to transmit and not in what they can transmit,” argued linguist Roman Jakobson. It`s not that speaking French makes it impossible to think of something gender-neutral, he suggested, but this language often forces you to think in gendered terms.

While in English you can say “I dine with my boyfriend” without specifying whether the friend is a man or a woman, in French you have to specify the sex of the friend and therefore think about it using a female or male name. Today, some still believe in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and it received some popular attention last year after being featured in the movie Arrival. When learning a new name, you should always learn its gender at the same time, as this affects the spelling and pronunciation of words associated with it, such as . B French adjectives. In French, all nouns and adjectives are specific to the masculine or feminine gender; Most nouns and adjectives also have different singular and plural forms. .