You might consider this essay my one-person protest against the random misuse and widespread butchery of the French language. Not that I count any of my possible readers among the perpetrators. Rather, I deliver this article as a preemptive strike against further crimes, so that you may carry the torch of linguistic wisdom.
French is an organized language. Whereas English has mostly exceptions to its few rules, French, in its orderly and staid manner, has limited exceptions to its many rules. Fortunately, it isn't necessary to learn them all if you only want to include a word or two here and there for local color.
The one rule I want to teach you here, and which must be kept in mind at all times, is that French is a gendered language. As in Spanish, Italian, Latin -- and in many other languages -- some words are feminine, others are masculine (some languages go as far as adding a third gender -- neuter).
In English, female beings are "she" (feminine), male beings are "he" (masculine), and everything else is "it" (neuter). These are simple distinctions, and don't make English a gendered language. True grammatical gender does not necessarily follow physical gender, although it may. Gender is, however, essential to the proper use of the language, and articles "le," "la" (both meaning "the") and "un," "une" (both meaning "a") are not applied at random, but depend on the grammatical gender of the word they precede. A quick peek at a dictionary will indicate which is appropriate ("le" and "un" are masculine, "la" and "une" are feminine).
How do you recognize grammatical gender in French? In most cases, "-e" (and sometimes "-a") at the end of a French word are indicators of the feminine gender. Therefore it's an easy guess that "route" (road) is feminine, and so is "femme" (woman).
It may seem less logical that a word ending in "-É" is masculine. However, you have to note the accent, the little apostrophe-like thingie on top of the letter. While in Spanish, the "´" on top of a vowel indicates stress and does not change the sound of the letter, in French, "e" and "É" are different letters for different sounds.
Therefore "fiancÉ" (same meaning as in English) is masculine, whereas "fiancÉe" is feminine, with the feminine marker "-e" added on. Therefore we have "le fiancÉ" and "la fiancÉe".
However, "-e" words are not the only feminine nouns. "Mer" (sea), "eau" (water), "beautÉ" (beauty) also fall in this category. There's a rule explaining why, but unless you've decided to take up French 101, you don't need to bother with it, and I'm not going to take up space explaining it.
Of course I understand that this one-lecture crash course is not going to solve all of your Gallic problems. But once you know that the distinctions I have noted above exist, you can rely on a good old dictionary to lead you along the straight path of rule-abiding grammatical correctness (and not on French-101 students -- unless they're A+ students and recognize their own limitations)
Masha Holl is a member of SARA, writing paranormal novels for the Wild Rose Press.
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