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French honorifics are based on the wide use of Madame for women and Monsieur for men. Social. Monsieur" (M.) for a man, The plural is Messieurs (MM. for short).
à la short for (ellipsis of) à la manière de; in the manner of/in the style of [1]à la carte lit. "on the card, i.e. menu". In restaurants it refers to ordering individual dishes from the menu rather than a fixed-price meal.
To make words or phrases gender-inclusive, French-speakers use two methods: Orthographic solutions strive to include both the masculine and feminine endings in the word. Examples include hyphens ( étudiant-e-s ), median-periods ( étudiant·e·s ), [ 5 ] parentheses ( étudiant(e)s ), or capital letters ( étudiantEs ).
Some (very rare) nouns change gender according to the way they are used: the words amour 'love' and délice 'pleasure' are masculine in singular and feminine in plural; the word orgue 'organ' is masculine, but when used emphatically in plural to refer to a church organ it becomes feminine (les grandes orgues); the plural noun gens 'people ...
A hendiadys is a phrase that contains two complementary words, and a gender-neutral hendiadys will include a feminine word and a masculine word, e.g. toutes et tous, citoyennes et citoyens. Within France, this gender-inclusive language has been met with some harsh resistance from the Académie Française and French conservatives .
The terms masculine ending and feminine ending are not based on any cultural concept of masculinity or femininity.Rather, they originate from a grammatical pattern of French, in which words of feminine grammatical gender typically end in a stressless syllable and words of masculine gender end in a stressed syllable. [2]
The Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (French pronunciation: [diksjɔnɛːʁ də lakademi fʁɑ̃sɛːz]) is the official dictionary of the French language. The Académie française is France's official authority on the usages, vocabulary, and grammar of the French language, although its recommendations carry no legal power. Sometimes ...
Feminist language reform seeks to remove words like this because they help to sustain unhealthy gender norms. [20] Some modern feminists, like Sergio Bolaños Cuellar, argue that feminist language reforms need to reverse the generic masculine forms and create a generic feminine form with words like he or man being replaced with she or woman. [39]