Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
French has a T-V distinction in the second person singular. That is, it uses two different sets of pronouns: tu and vous and their various forms. The usage of tu and vous depends on the kind of relationship (formal or informal) that exists between the speaker and the person with whom they are speaking and the age differences between these subjects. [1]
This is a key difference from English: in English, possessive pronouns are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their antecedent — e.g., in "the tables are his", the form "his" indicates that the antecedent (the possessor) is masculine singular, whereas in the French les tables sont les siennes, "siennes" or its base form "sien ...
For such nouns, there will very often be one noun of each gender, with the choice of noun being determined by the natural gender of the person described; for example, a male singer is un chanteur, while a female singer is either une chanteuse (a pop singer) or une cantatrice (an opera singer). A plural noun that refers to both males and females ...
A pronoun can still carry gender even if it does not inflect for it; for example, in the French sentence je suis petit ("I am small") the speaker is male and so the pronoun je is masculine, whereas in je suis petite the speaker is female and the pronoun is treated as feminine, the feminine ending -e consequently being added to the predicate ...
"Docteur" (Dr) is used for medical practitioners whereas "Professeur" is used for professors and teachers.The holders of a doctorate other than medical are generally not referred to as Docteurs, though they have the legal right to use the title; Professors in academia used the style Monsieur le Professeur rather than the honorific plain Professeur.
Thus the French word for "I" is je, regardless of who is speaking; but this word becomes feminine or masculine depending on the sex of the speaker, as may be reflected through adjective agreement: je suis forte ("I am strong", spoken by a female); je suis fort (the same spoken by a male).
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
The official statistics of France, available on the INSEE website, do not include total life expectancy for the population as a whole. For a more correct comparison of regions with various differences in life expectancy for men and women, a column with the arithmetic mean of these indicators was added to the tables.