Welcome, Stranger, part two. French, part two

I recently moved to France from America, as I have written in earlier essays. Many Americans are annoyed at the subtlety of the French language. I embrace it, but some people try to find work-arounds. 

One example is gender. As someone once said, every French noun is either a girl or a boy, and you’d better not get them mixed up. There are some patterns but no clear rules to distinguish them. In Spanish, nouns ending with -a are usually feminine, and nouns ending with -o are usually masculine. There are a few exceptions, such as la mano, the hand. But in French there are no general rules. Sometimes, in word pairs, one is masculine and the other feminine, such as le bois (the woods, masculine) and la forêt (the forest, feminine). But there is not much of an alternative to just learning the gender while learning the noun.

It often does not help to read the noun, even when it has a definite article. The school, for example, is l’école, and the L could be either le or la. You just have to learn that école is…um…I forgot.

American writer David Sedaris used one creative approach. Just get two of everything. For instance, the box is le boîte (notice the circumflex indicating that there used to be an x there), a masculine noun, and the bottle is la bouteille, feminine. But for the plurals, the definite article is les: les boîtes, les bouteilles. So just never refer to a noun in the singular and you’re safe. I think Sedaris, as always, was just being humorous. Because the gender never disappears. When you say the boxes to which, it is les boîtes auxquels, but the bottles to which is bouteilles auxquelles. Fortunately, when you are talking, people cannot (I think) tell the difference between auxquels and auxquelles.

The French language is just one thing that the French proudly defend as part of their cultural uniqueness. In an upcoming I will tell you about more ways the French are culturally unique, and provide an evolutionary background for it.