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Neologisms such as iel, ille, ul, ol and yul have emerged in recent years as gender-neutral alternatives to the masculine and feminine pronouns, but are not yet considered standard in French [2] despite their use in some speech communities. [3] Iel (plural iels) is the most widely-known and used gender-neutral pronoun. [citation needed]
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 ...
The Italian word scimmia ("ape") is feminine, whereas the Spanish word simio is masculine. The French word mer is feminine, but the Spanish cognate mar is generally masculine (except in some poetic contexts and among sea workers [39]), whereas the Catalan cognate mar can be masculine or feminine
Polish: Masculine personal, Masculine animate, Masculine inanimate, Feminine, Neuter (traditionally, only masculine, feminine and neuter genders are recognized). Pama–Nyungan languages including Dyirbal and other Australian languages have gender systems such as: Masculine, feminine (see Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things), vegetable and neuter ...
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 ...
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 ).
In French, articles and determiners are required on almost every common noun, much more so than in English. They are inflected to agree in gender (masculine or feminine) and number (singular or plural) with the noun they determine, though most have only one plural form (for masculine and feminine). Many also often change pronunciation when the ...
Furthermore, some see evidence of the intentional preference of the masculine over the feminine. It has been argued that 17th-century grammaticians who wanted to assert male dominance worked to suppress the feminine forms of certain professions, leading to the modern-day rule that prefers the masculine over the feminine in the French language. [4]