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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 ...
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.
The default assignment is the borrowing language's unmarked gender. Rarely, the word retains the gender it had in the donor language. This tends to happen more frequently in more formal language such as scientific terms, where some knowledge of the donor language can be expected. Sometimes the gender of a word switches with time.
France has taken this step in 2012. [1] In Belgium, its use is not recommended, but not forbidden either. In France, calling a young woman "Mademoiselle" is usually considered more polite, and calling a middle-aged woman "Mademoiselle" can be a way to tell her that she looks like she is in her twenties and may therefore be considered flattering.
This category is not for articles about concepts and things but only for articles about the words themselves. As such almost all article titles should be italicized (with Template:Italic title). Please keep this category purged of everything that is not actually an article about a word or phrase. See as example Category:English words
The French definite article derives from a Latin distal demonstrative, ille. [1] It evolved from the Old French article system, which shared resemblance to modern English and acquired the marking of generic nouns. [2] This practise was common by the 17th century, although it has been argued that this became widely used as early as in the 13th ...
LGBT+ rights advocates and feminists have argued in favour of the pronoun's use, arguing that it makes the language more inclusive and less sexist. [15] [16] [17] Some advocates have also raised concerns that lack of gender neutral options in French might force non-binary people to turn towards languages that do have more prominent gender neutral options instead, notably the English language.
French has a complex system of personal pronouns (analogous to English I, we, they, and so on). When compared to English, the particularities of French personal pronouns include: a T-V distinction in the second person singular (familiar tu vs. polite vous) the placement of object pronouns before the verb: « Agnès les voit. » ("Agnès sees ...