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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 ...
The basic form is lequel (le + quel; see French articles and determiners for information about each component). Both parts of lequel are inflected to agree with its referent in gender and number: hence, laquelle, lesquels, lesquelles. The prepositions à and de contract with le and les to form au, aux, du, and des, respectively; this is still ...
French nouns whose spoken plural forms are distinguished from the singular include most of those ending in -al, whose plural form is -aux (cf. cheval [ʃəval] > chevaux [ʃəvo] 'horses'), as well as a few nouns ending in -ail that also follow this pattern (cf. travail [tʁavaj] > travaux [tʁavo] 'works').
Romance languages have a number of shared features across all languages: Romance languages are moderately inflecting, i.e. there is a moderately complex system of affixes (primarily suffixes) that are attached to word roots to convey grammatical information such as number, gender, person, tense, etc. Verbs have much more inflection than nouns.
Languages with grammatical gender, such as French, German, Greek, and Spanish, present unique challenges when it comes to creating gender-neutral language.Unlike genderless languages like English, constructing a gender-neutral sentence can be difficult or impossible in these languages due to the use of gendered nouns and pronouns.
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 ).
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Feminization is also related to neutralization, which is the process of replacing masculine forms of words (i.e. policeman) with gender-unmarked forms (i.e. police officer). [2] Not to be confused with feminization in sociology, though the two subjects are inter-related.