I’ve always felt that engendering nouns in a language when they don’t inherently have gender is a mistake. Partly because I suspect it taints one’s perception of the world, given how a culture both shapes and is shaped by their language, but mostly because it makes mistakes much more likely with little benefit1.
Skilled designers of programming languages know well that you can’t make writing bad code harder without hurting everyone, but you can make writing good code easier2. A good programming language strives to make the best way of doing things also the most intuitive but is designed with the understanding that it must not be a burden to skilled users3.
I’m the first to admit that English has its problems, such as having at/in/to/into and do/make when French proves you only need à and faire, but aside from making it easier to have recognizable, intuitive masculine and feminine variants of the same given name, all French’s noun engenderment seems to do is complicate the language for learners, increase the number of details you have to keep track of, and introduce opportunities for further counter-intuitive quirks down the line.
Why masculinité (masculinity), moustache (moustache), and barbe (beard) are feminine nouns while féminisme (feminism) is masculine, I’ll never know, but I strongly suspect it’s because natural languages are living things and, as frustrating as it is for language professors, ordinary people with more pressing concerns than correct semantics are a big part of the process which drives languages to grow and change.
1. I also have opinions on which types of pronouns should and shouldn’t be engendered, but let’s stay focused.
2. The Java and Python programming languages demonstrate this contrast well.
3. Unfortunately, it’s also human nature for people to react emotionally to criticisms of something they’ve deeply invested themselves in, so many programmers will excuse or even defend flaws in their language of choice as misunderstood features.
Learning French: A Brief Comment on Noun Engenderment by Stephan Sokolow is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
I suggest you have a look at the gender patterns in French, it’s all about the suffixes (German language follows a similiar approach, e.g. “die Männlichkeit” (de) = “la masculinité” (fr) = “masculinity” (en), with “die” indicating the female gender of the word) and might help you a lot:
Male suffixes for French:
http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/genderpatterns.htm
Female suffixes:
http://french.about.com/od/grammar/a/genderpatterns_2.htm
One more thing: in german you can have composite nouns, the gender is based on the last word here (not exactly the same as the suffix thing but the same pattern in a way).
Der Schatz = the treasure (male)
Die Karte = the map (female)
Die Schatzkarte = the treasure map (female, since the last part of the word was of female gender!)
Thanks. My grammar textbook actually did include a list, but those pages seem much more complete and will definitely help me.
Also, thanks for the information on German. I may not be studying it, but I’m always fascinated by new knowledge. (As long as it’s not in a really badly-written textbook.)
However, I still think noun engenderment is an unhelpful idea and, given how many exceptions those two pages list, you can’t really say that nouns are engendered based on their suffixes. Rather, when creating new words, people engender them by their suffixes as a band-aid solution to the complexity the core feature introduces into the language.
The point I made in footnote #3 still stands.
Invoking #3 on you 😛
How so? I’m honestly curious as to what benefits noun engenderment brings to a language that can’t be had by engendering pronouns only.
As a native English speaker, it seems obvious to me that engendering things which don’t inherently have gender (even if it is done with an exception-free list of word suffixes) only complicates things… and #3 deals with defending complications without adequately defending the claim that their utility is great enough to justify the complexity they add.