Why would an American write a book on the rules for the gender of French nouns?

 

by

 

Saul H. Rosenthal

Le Dr Saul Rosenthal est diplômé de l'Université Harvard avec mention très bien. Il a obtenu son diplôme de médecin de l'École de médecine d'Harvard et a accompli un internat au Boston City Hospital et une résidence au Massachusetts Mental Health Center, l'un et l'autre à Harvard. Il est ensuite devenu assistant, puis professeur associé, à l'École de médecine de l'Université du Texas, à San Antonio. Dans la mi-trentaine, il déclina une offre de présidence d'un département et ouvrit un cabinet. Il prit sa retraite avant 60 ans et se consacra à sa passion de la France et de la langue française.

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Shortly after I retired, some seventeen years ago, my wife and I began to spend several months a year in France. We avoided other expatriates and found friends among the French people all around us. We were in France to meet the French, after all, not other English-speaking people. My French, which was moderately poor when we started out, naturally began to improve. I stopped carrying a little French-English dictionary in my back pocket because as my French improved, I discovered that the words I didn't recognize no longer could be found in the little pocket dictionary.

However, as my French improved, I started wondering about the gender of French nouns, why an arm is masculine while a leg is feminine? Why my sofa is masculine but my chair is feminine? It made no sense to me that an eye is masculine, but an ear is feminine? And why should a person or victim always be feminine, even if the person or the victim I'm referring to happens to be a man? And how odd that a breast, the essence of femininity, is masculine, while the word masculinité itself is feminine!

While the illogic of French gender can be puzzling and frustrating to the new student of French, native French speakers (like yourselves) learn the language with their mother's milk. They know automatically whether a noun is masculine or feminine, but they have no idea why. They never even think of the questions I posed in the last paragraph.

Francophones accept the gender and take it for granted, but usually they are unaware that there are rules for masculinity and femininity that can be discovered by observation. In fact the possibility doesn't even occur to them.

When, for example, I have told French friends that all nouns ending in ET, like ballet and ticket, are masculine, they are not aware of it. They will run several more ET words through their heads to verify, and then nod and say something like, "You're right, that's very interesting. I never realized it!" It's not something they are normally conscious of.

Thus, the answer to the question "Why would an American write a book on the rules for the gender of French Nouns?" is clear. It would never occur to a French speaker to write a book like this. The gender of nouns is a puzzle for non-French speakers, but French speakers never even think about it.

The Rules for the Gender of French Nouns : Why your arm is masculine but your leg is feminine, and other mysteries of the French language (paperback & Kindle editions)

I actually began this study, not with the intention of writing a book, but rather to satisfy my own curiosity. The rules I discovered, and which you will find in my book The Rules for the Gender of French Nouns, are empirical rules, not theoretical ones. They were derived through my encounters with hundreds, if not thousands, of nouns from my everyday conversations and from ordinary reading.

Having had a scientific training, I went about discovering these rules in a pragmatic and practical way, and it will help you to understand the book if you know how I arrived at them:

My first step was to make lists of different noun endings that I encountered. Then, as I found each new noun, I wrote it alongside the appropriate noun ending in one of two columns, according to whether it was masculine or feminine.

It soon became clear that there were certain noun endings that always (or almost always) indicated that the noun was masculine. There were other noun endings that always (or almost always) indicated that the noun was feminine. I also found that there was a third, actually smaller, group of noun endings that did not follow either rule. Nouns with these endings could be either masculine or feminine.

I also found that it didn't matter if the nouns were in proper French or were in casual language (langage familier), or in slang. If they were in any kind of French, they followed these rules.

My goal, thus, was to make sense out of the big jumble of masculine and feminine words that the reader would encounter, and to present simple, easy-to-recognize, and easy-to-follow rules.

As I discussed a noun ending in the text, I included examples of nouns to illustrate it. I did this for two reasons. The first reason was so that the reader could see how common (or uncommon) the noun ending is, and the second reason is to make it easier to recognize the noun-ending pattern when the reader saw or heard it.

For instance, if I just stated that nouns with ET endings were masculine, the rule wouldn't be connected to anything tangible and would be easy to forget. However if I tied it to examples of nouns ending in ET (like ticket, billet, valet, crochet, mollet, brevet and ballet) the reader would have a visual image of it and would be much less likely to forget it.

Because these words have been collected randomly from everyday usage, I don't make any claim that I've collected all the nouns for any noun ending, or that the lists of exceptions are exhaustive.

Indeed, my goal was not to try to be exhaustive in terms of finding all the odd little exceptions, but rather to give the reader broad rules that are readily remembered, and that are therefore useful to him or her on a daily basis.

On the other hand, I have tried to be comprehensive. While other lists of rules of gender just give a few miscellaneous rules and leave the reader guessing for all the rest of the nouns in the language, I've tried to give useful rules for all, or almost all, of the nouns the reader will encounter.

After reading this book, if an anglophone sees words like croisement, or pays, or vin, or chocolat, he or she will know that they are masculine, and, in the same way, he or she will recognize immediately that ville, facture, maladie and essence are feminine words.

For each edition of The Rules for The Gender of French Nouns, as new examples and counter-examples have emerged, I have made small changes to perfect the rules, adding or modifying as the case may have been. The sole goal has been to make the rules as accurate and as easy to use as possible. The book is now in its fourth edition.

Writing the book was a labor of love for me. It was constantly exciting to encounter an interesting new noun to be used as an example or as an exception, and to figure out how the nouns could best be divided into coherent groups that would be easy to memorize. I suspect that I will never feel that the work is truly completed.

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Commentaire du blog :

 

À propos de genre...

L'ouvrage du D^rRosenthal arrive à point nommé, au moment où la polémique fait rage à propos de la notion de genre. Ce problème du genre des noms est un casse-tête que connaissent tous ceux qui entreprennent l'étude d'une langue qui en comporte deux (comme le français ou l'espagnol), voire trois (comme l'allemand).  En effet, toutes les langues ne présentent pas l'avantage, comme le turc, d'ignorer complètement la notion de genre. Or, cette distinction entre le masculin et le féminin, n'est ni arbitraire, ni aléatoire. Elle obéit à des règles, mais celles-ci sont le plus souvent méconnues des locuteurs eux-mêmes. Lorsque j'étudiais l'allemand en cours du soir, je me suis vite aperçu que les noms en ung (comme Leitung, Richtung, Werbung) ou en eit (comme Freiheit, Gemütlichkeit ou Seligkeit) étaient toujours du genre féminin et je l'ai fait remarquer à l'enseignante allemande. Celle-ci a paru étonnée car, pour elle, le genre des noms était quelque chose d'instinctif. Il suffisait, disait-elle, de mémoriser l'article (der, die ou das) en même temps que le nom. De même, en espagnol, les noms se terminant par un o seront masculins et ceux se terminant pas un a féminins. Ainsi, le béret se dit la boina. La coiffure change de genre en traversant les Pyrénées. Tout cela montre l'intérêt que peut présenter le regard de celui qui, comme le D^r Rosenthal, observe de l'extérieur les bizarreries d'un idiome qui n'est pas sa langue maternelle.

Jean Leclercq

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Books by Shaul Rosenthal:

Speaking Better French: The Key Words and Expressions that You'll Need Every Day	French Key Words and Expressions: The Combined Book
French Faux Amis: The Combined Book	Oddities and Curiosities of the English Language
Conversation en anglais, les mots et expressions-clés	All the French You Use Without Knowing It

Comments

[Rédigé par : Cappucciyo]

I've been very upset by this books : in fact it doesn't explain why a word has a perticular gender, as the summary could imply, but it just says how to recognize the gender of a word, which is not the same thing. The legacy of latin and regional languages is magnificently ignored by the author, whose main concern was to make list of words. Technically, he's right, as it gives the reader clues to recognize the gender of words, but you don't feel more intelligent after the reading of this book.

[Rédigé par : Jonathan Goldberg]

Dear Reader,

Thank you for submitting a comment to Le-mot-juste-en-a glass.com

I am sorry that the book was not up to your expectations. As you know, the authors methodology was presented in the first person, so this was not intended as a review and we did not attempt to recommend it.

As the articles on our blog are almost without exception written in French, I wonder if you have read others, or if you happened to encounter the blog only on this single occasion.

If you are American, I would like to send you a sneak view of an article I have just written in English on the subject of American English, as I have to experienced it in the 15 years in which I have lived here (in California).
I would be interested in your comments or suggestions, before I submit it for publication.

Thank you again.
Regards
Jonathan Goldberg

Sent from my iPad