End o’ Genders

Sorry to have been away – a problem with the pc meant no access for several days.  Sorry too, in a way, to be back on to the subject of gender.  If you have read earlier posts you must think I’m making a real meal of this, and maybe even making it sound something of a difficulty.   Not at all – it’s just that we started with one of the topics that learners often quote as puzzling, and I’m just clearing this section of deck before moving on to… well, anything you want me to explain, really.  So here goes with some really easy tips on how to remember (or be able to deduce) the gender of several thousands of French words!

Masculine endings.

• All nouns ending in “-ment” are masculine, with a single exception, and that is the word for a mare (“la jument”).  You have to admit that this is logical.
• Almost all nouns ending in “-age” are masculine, with just six exceptions.   You can remember these by means of a simple story.
  • A dog appeared on a French beach (la plage) after swimming (à la nage) from a ship, whereupon it was discovered that the dog had rabies (la rage).  The dog was immediately put into a cage (yes, you’ve guessed: une cage), and the local press came to take a picture (une image), which then appeared on the front page (la page) of the paper.

With those six exceptions in place you can safely use the words “village”, “garage” or any other word in “-age” and be totally sure that they are masculine, requiring “le” or “un”.   Note also that there is a word “le page”, but it means, not a page in a book, but a pageboy.  Again, the logic is convincing.

• Words in “-isme” are masculine.  These account for that vast range of “-isms” which we recognise in parallel English form – “le nationalisme”, etc – and naturally they include “le féminisme”!
• Words in “-ier” are masculine ( a good number have a feminine form “-ière”).
• Words ending in “-eau” are almost all masculine, so you will say “le” before “chapeau, bateau, château,”, etc.  The small handful of exceptions include words which are quite useful, although you will notice that the “eau” bit is hardly an ending, but almost comprises the whole word:  “l’eau” (water) and “la peau” (skin) are the two to remember.

Feminine Endings

A few basic principles will also serve us well here.  Most notably,

• Words in “-ion” are almost always feminine.  For some reason the few exceptions include the words for large mechanical objects like a lorry “un camion”, or an aeroplane (“un avion”).    Large numbers with this ending (million, etc) are also masculine.
• Words which end in “-tion” are always feminine: “la satisfaction”, “la pollution”, “l’administration”, etc.  (Ok, I can think of one exception, but we won’t even go there.)
• As we saw in an early post, nouns in “-ette” will essentially refer to diminutive or other softer forms of a masculine version.  In English we not only use imported words like maisonette or cigarette, but actually create words of our own with the ending: suffragette and ladette spring to mind. But notice, in French, the importance of grammatical gender: the feminine word “la vedette” (meaning a star, in the celebrity sense) can refer equally to size zero fashion models or to hulking rugby players! Out of interest, although the English word “star” has crept into the language over recent years, it has been given feminine gender, no doubt by analogy with “vedette”.
  
• The ending “-elle” is essentially feminine, as in Mademoiselle, etc.  Again, there are no exceptions to this, which is why the word “sentinelle” (sentry) is feminine even though it traditionally always referred to a male person.
• Words in “-ance” or “-ence” are feminine, with the important exception of “le silence”. (They had to throw in one exception, just to keep us on our toes!)
• Words ending in “-té” are feminine – as in “la clarté” (brightness), or “la simplicité”.

In addition to these rules of thumb based on endings, there are a few categories of things which are always masculine:

• Days, months and seasons
• Metals and chemical bodies
• Almost all trees – “une aubépine” (hawthorn) is the main exception
• The names of languages.

Er… what about “-eur”?

The ending “-eur” can indicate either masculine or feminine gender, but even here there is a simple rule which can help us make the correct choice in just about every case:

• When used to designate male persons who are carrying out actions or professions it is, unsurprisingly, masculine.  Very often the English ending “-er” (or “-ar”) is seen in translation. Thus we have the words “le professeur” (teacher), “un joueur” (a player) or “un menteur” (a liar) – not to mention the recent  coining “un eBayeur”!
• Words ending in “-eur” which denote mechanical or other material objects are also masculine – for example, “un téléviseur” is a television set (as opposed to the ethereal medium called “la télévision”), while a computer is “un ordinateur” and a vacuum cleaner is “un aspirateur”.

On the other hand, abstract nouns ending in “-eur” are feminine, with (for practical purposes) the single exception of “l’honneur”; thus you can safely deduce that heat is “la chaleur”, and fear is “la peur”.

I hope you find that that listing makes the system seem much less arbitrary and confusing than it sometimes appears.  Remember: no one’s going to laugh at you or turn away in horror if you get a gender wrong, but it does stand out as an error, and if (as in tennis or other sports) you can reduce the number of unforced errors it ensures a better performance.  And I guess that if you didn’t want a better performance you wouldn’t be reading this blog…