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This leads to sentences such as (5a) in English, and (6a) in French. Example of gender-neutral masculine: English (5) a. If anybody comes, tell him. masculine him used to refer to a person of unknown sex b. *If anybody comes, tell her. feminine her is not used to refer to a person of unknown sex Example of collective masculine: French (6) a.
Job titles have a masculine and a feminine version in Russian, though in most cases the feminine version is only used in colloquial speech. The masculine form is typically treated as "unmarked", i.e. it does not necessarily imply that the person is male, while the feminine form is "marked" and can only be used when referring to a woman. In some ...
In Spanish, for instance, a cheetah is always un guepardo (masculine) and a zebra is always una cebra (feminine), regardless of their biological sex. In Russian a rat and a butterfly are always krysa (крыса) and babochka (бабочка) (feminine). In French, a giraffe is always une girafe, whereas an elephant is always un éléphant.
French personal pronouns (analogous to English I, you, he/she, we, and they) reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well (much like the English distinction between him and her, except that French lacks an inanimate third person pronoun it or a gender neutral they and thus draws this distinction among all third person nouns, singular ...
In France and French-speaking countries, it can happen for people to have a combination of both masculine and feminine given names, but most of these include "Marie", such as Jean-Marie, Marie-Jean, Marie-Pierre. [16] Marie was a unisex name in medieval times; it is nowadays only female except for its presence in compound names.
In some cases, this alternation is reflected in the orthography: un beau cygne but un bel oiseau (both masculine singular). As indicated in the phonetic representations above, liaison consonants are typically realized with enchainement – that is, the originally word-final consonant is pronounced as the onset of the following syllable.
The prepositions à (' to, at ') and de (' of, from ') form contracted forms with the masculine and plural articles le and les: au, du, aux, and des, respectively.. Like the, the French definite article is used with a noun referring to a specific item when both the speaker and the audience know what the item is.
With a few adjectives of the latter type, there are two masculine singular forms: one used before consonants (the basic form), and one used before vowels. For example, the adjective beau ("beautiful") changes form from un beau garçon ("a handsome boy") to un bel homme ("a handsome man"). Some adjectives change position depending on their ...