Lost your password? Please enter your email address. You will receive a link and will create a new password via email.

What is the capital of Tunisia?

Please type your username.

Please type your E-Mail.

Please choose the appropriate section so the question can be searched easily.

Please choose suitable Keywords Ex: question, poll.

Type the description thoroughly and in details.

What is the capital of Tunisia?

word gender – why masculine or feminine?

Please note that gender is not the same as sex.

With regards to your actual question, how is gender decided for new words?”, I can’t answer definitively for French (as I’m not a native speaker) but I can make some educated guesses based upon what I know of French, what I know of language evolution and how this goes in my own native language, which is gendered as well.

I assume it is like with any evolution of language, a combination of usage and formal or informal rules (which are themselves derived from usage).

Ie, people start using a certain word and to use it they have to assign it a gender. They choose this gender based on any number of reasons (similar words, the way it sounds, the ending of the word, its meaning, …). If enough people use a certain gender it gets recognized and added to the dictionary with that gender.

Drawing from my native language, Dutch, there have evolved a few rules-of-thumb for guessing the gender of words, which can be applied to new words. If the new word is a barbarism (an import from another language, such as English) there might be a number of rules specifically for handling such words.

Examples of such rules in Dutch are:

  • words that describe abstract concepts are usually feminine, words that
    describe concrete objects usually masculine. (Thus “universiteit”
    (university) is both feminine and masculine, depending on whether you mean
    the institution or the building).
  • anglicisms (barbarisms from
    English) are usually masculine or feminine, unless specific rules apply. For
    example, words ending on -ism or -asm in English are usually neuter.

To answer to the particular question about the euro case, the choice to use the masculine is natural.

89% of the words ending with an ‘o’ are masculine and the majority of the ones that are feminine are actually shortened variants of longer feminine words not ending with an ‘o’, e.g.:

une diapo(sitive), expo(sition), info(rmation), moto(cyclette), météo(rologie), photo(graphie), promo(tion), sono(risation), stéréo(phonie), thalasso(thérapie)…

Euro is not the shortcut of the feminine Europe but a word per se so the masculine was a natural choice.

Other reasons for this choice are the Euro replaced the masculine Ecu, tries to compete with the masculine dollar and follows the Franc which was masculine too.

Note that there is however no rule for a currency name gender. Some old or current ones were/are feminine, like the Spanish peseta, Italian lire, Greech drachme , English livre (pound) or the Scandinavian couronnes.

See also Is there any general rule to determine the gender of a noun based on its spelling? for word endings / gender relationship.

The main rule is the habit, that’s why most of the following “rules” have plenty of exceptions. You really can’t (except maybe for the first rule) take them seriously to guess the gender of an unknown noun.

The termination of a noun is a good clue about its gender. If you know many nouns that ends the same way and are of the same gender it is probable that other nouns that end the same way are of the same gender. Some common “families” are:

  • nouns that end in “-tion” or “-té” are mostly feminine
  • nouns that end in “-oir” or “-er” are are mostly masculine

Abstract concepts are usually feminine: la liberté (freedom), la vérité (truth), la société (society)…

Often, parts of something are of the opposite gender: un mois (a month), une semaine (a week), un jour (a day), une heure (an hour).

When two items are working as a duo there is usually one masculine and one feminine: la lune et le soleil (the moon and the sun), le couteau et la fourchette (the knife and the fork).

When two words are very close synonyms usually the one with the most abstract meaning is feminine and the one with the most concrete one is masculine: une pierre/un caillou (both mean “a stone” but “la pierre” designate the general concept of stone).

Finally, feminine nouns usually end with a “-e” and masculine nouns don’t. Notice that most of the examples I gave follow this rule but it isn’t an absolute.

 

Leave a comment

What is the capital of Tunisia?