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Curtis "Ovid" Poe (he/him)

@ZachWeinersmith

Just stumbled on an article which claims you can be 80% accurate with a simple rule of thumb. frenchtogether.com/french-noun

Feminine noun endings
- The majority of words that end in -e or -ion.
- Except words ending in -age, -ege, -é, or -isme

Masculine noun endings
- Most words with other endings are masculine.

You'll have to read the article for more context. @tshirtman : comments?

6 Sep 2023 at 12:56 | Wall-to-wall | Open on fosstodon.org
3 comments
Gabriel Pettier

@ovid @ZachWeinersmith well, the article only claims 80% accuracy, which is probably fair, and i didn’t do my own stats, but surely i can find exceptions if i look hard enough.

Now i need a similar rule for Dutch, which i’m half-assed learning 😆 (and it doesn’t try to pretend het and de are about masculine/feminine, but the rules of what is each eludes me, and it does impact grammar a lot).

6 Sep 2023 at 13:03 | Open on mas.to
Rafael Garcia-Suarez

@tshirtman @ovid @ZachWeinersmith It's fun when the gender is used to distinguish similar words: "le livre" (the book, exception to the rule), "la livre" (the pound).
For Dutch, there are a few rules, like: diminutive in -je -> het, noun from a compound verb -> het, people -> de (except diminutives like meisje), words in -heid -> de... I don't remember much more than that :)

6 Sep 2023 at 13:20 | Open on metasocial.com
Gabriel Pettier

@rgs @ovid @ZachWeinersmith yeah, we also have "espace", which makes it even more subtle, since it starts with vowel, the article is always escaped as "l’espace", but sometimes it means "le espace" (an actual physical space) and sometimes "la espace" (the typographical character).

Hence rules about phonetics being limited, there are always weird cases.

6 Sep 2023 at 13:25 | Open on mas.to
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