The Rules for the Gender of French Nouns

By Saul H. Rosenthal. Tucson, Hats Off Books, 2004. 115 pp. Pb $11.95. The subtitle of the book is arresting: will it really offer a plausible and principled account of why arms are masculine and legs feminine? No, it won't, of course, and nor could it. Grammatical gender of the French kind (and grammatical gender in any known language for that matter) is just a morphological device for partitioning nouns into groups. These groups often display form-gender correlations (for example, all written French nouns ending in -et are masculine), but there is no causal link between the entity described by a noun and the grammatical gender it takes. The reason why arms are masculine in French is an effect of historical accident; it could have been otherwise — in Latin they were neuter, in Irish they are feminine. What is the book really about? It is a list of thirty-five rules which try to capture the correlations between the written forms of nouns and their gender. Rule 1 is ‘Nouns ending in -T are masculine’. The others take a similar form: Rule 11: ‘Nouns ending in -O are masculine’. Rule 24: ‘Nouns ending with -CHE are feminine’; and so on. The rules are not exceptionless, and in addition to giving examples which are consistent with each rule, Rosenthal lists the exceptions; forêt, dent and mort are exceptions to rule 1, for instance. So the rules are probabilistic rules of thumb ‘derived through [the author's] encounters with hundreds, if not thousands, of nouns from [his] everyday conversations and from ordinary reading’ (p. 1). It is the equivalent of a trainspotter's guide, but to French noun gender rather than locomotives. It is not without charm. Uncluttered by reference to previous studies of grammatical gender, the book at times provides interesting insight into the empiricist method of the author: ‘As I collected my words, I noted that I was encountering a fairly large number of them which were singular words, but ended in an S ... almost all of these words are masculine’ (p. 13). His enthusiasm for the task is also evident: ‘It was constantly exciting to encounter a new noun to be used as an example or an exception ...’ p. 3). This is a book for the student of French who likes memorizable rules; an observer's book of French gender

Grammatical Gender · Irish · Linguistics · Noun · Proper noun · Subtitle · Gender Studies in Language · Philosophy · Psychology