For example, when you say “the door” in French, it’s feminine; “La porte” instead of “Le porte”. What happens if I use “Le” instead of “La”? Does it change the meaning?
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It doesn’t change the meaning, it’s just not correct. It would be like saying “an spaghetti sauce”. The article is not correct.
>What happens if I use “Le” instead of “La”? Does it change the meaning?
In French specifically, it does for a several words. For example, “la tour” is “the tower”, whereas “le tour” is “the tour”, with tour in the English sense (with different connotations, but the same general meaning)
A few examples:
* Une poele is a frying pan, un poele is a wood-burning stove.
* Une moule is a mussel, un moule is a baking pan
* La memoire is the abstract concept of memory, un memoire is either an academic dissertation or sometimes an autobiography
* Une livre is a pound (like the weight), un livre is a book
* Une voile is a sail, un voile is a veil
* La mode means fashion in general, une mode means a specific trend, and un mode is a method of doing something (like English “mode”)
* “Manche” is a word with a bunch of different meanings relating to things that your hands tour or grip, some are male and some are female (for example, a door handle is male, a hand in a card game is female)
* Une vase is basically a muddy area, un vase is a vase in the English sense, for putting flowers in.
First, it’s important to recognize that, for the most part, “grammatical gender” doesn’t have anything directly to do with gender as sex-based roles or gender identity, etc.
In languages that have gendered nouns, it helps provide clarity. For example, take this sentence in English (which does not have gendered nouns):
*I have a cat that is in the house that is mine.*
In English it’s unclear whether the “that” is refering to “a cat” or “the house”.
In a language that has gendered nouns, like German, it wouldn’t be unclear because the pronoun “that” would be different depending on whether it was referring to “die Katze” (the cat, feminine gender) or “das Haus” (the house, neuter gender).
So that’s the function of gendering nouns, but it’s also important to understand that “masculine/feminine/neuter” genders are not the only way languages grammatically gender nouns. It’s common in Indo-European languages, but there are many languages that either:
* don’t have any genders for nouns but still have genders for pronouns (e.g. English)
* don’t have genders but have noun “classifiers” to indicate things like size and quantity of noun objects (sign languages as well as many Asian languages)
* grammatical gender but around other axes unrelated to sexual gender like animate/inanimate (e.g. Vietnamese)
* many grammatical genders (e.g. many African languages have 10-20 “grammatical genders” … although linguists tend to call them “noun classes” at that point because they’re so far removed from sexual genders).
All of which is to say that grammatical gender is a linguistic construct that only is *tangentially* related to sexual gender in *some* languages and *entirely unrelated* in other languages.
As everything that has to do with human languages, gendered nouns are a mess 🙂 and function somewhat differently in different languages.
A few people here already gave you examples from French where changing the gender changes the meaning. This isn’t a language feature that would be related to gendered words, the existence of these examples is a similar coincidence to the existence of homonyms – words that are spelled the same but have different meaning. For example, “bank” in English can (among other things) be “a river bank” or “account in a bank”. These two “bank”s have a completely different etymology and they just happen to end up spelled and pronounced the same in current English. Many examples of masculine and feminine forms of the same word having different meanings are such accidents.
Of course, there are also cases where the change of gender is also meaningful. For example, the Spanish “el gato” and “la gata” are words for a male and a female cat. Here it’s actually two forms of the same word, with one extra difference: the first one uses the masculine suffix -o, the second one the feminine suffix -a.
There isn’t one universal way how words get their genders. In many languages the genders for inanimate objects mostly follow syntactic rules. For example, in German one way to form diminuitives is by attaching the -chen suffix, and grammatically everything with this suffix is in neuter (a neutral gender that’s neither masculine nor feminine). Der Tisch (a table, masculine) becomes das Tischchen (a tiny table, neuter). The current German word for a girl, das Mädchen, is also in neuter due to this grammatical reason, even though girls are obviously feminine. (The word itself is a diminuitive of an old word for a girl-servant, cognate with the modern English “maid”.)
Many languages (e.g., Latin and also almost all modern Slavic languages) express grammatical cases via suffixes. If you saw the movie Life of Brian, there is one famous scene where the Roman centurion corrects Brian’s spelling, and one of the corrections is that his original “domus” (the home) should be “domum” (in the direction towards the home). In Slovak, the English phrases “a rabbit”, “meat of a rabbit”, and “stew with a rabbit” are spelled “zaja**c**”, “mäso zo zaja**ca**”, and “guláš so zaja**com**”. In these languages, there are multiple sets of suffixes that can be used to express the different grammatical cases, and the grammatical gender of inanimate objects is mostly determined by the best-fitting set of suffixes. To put it very simply, words that rhyme tend to have the same gender. So, for example, words for inanimate objects that resemble words for actually masculine objects now have the masculine grammatical gender and use the same or very similar suffixes for declension.
Word etymology, phonology, analogies with animate objects and many other factors can also play a role. As I said in the beginning, it’s a mess with no single correct answer 🙂
Related sidebar: While back a coworker was complaining about the seemingly arbitrary gendering in French to our department heads. As an example he asked the two of them what gender the printer in their office was. They both simultaneously and independently answered with the opposite option. 🤪
> What happens if I use “Le” instead of “La”? Does it change the meaning?
The same as if you say “an door” in English. It’s just wrong, but people will generally still understand your meaning.
Gender has become an obsession lately, but grammatically gender is merely a way of classifying how nouns and objects connect to each other.
Las patatas bravas estan muy deliciosas. The Potatoes Bravas are very delicious.
Why is deliciosas (delicious) plural? Because patatas is plural. Why is deliciosas feminine? Patata is feminine.
Grammatical Gender has nothing to with Human Sexual Gender
Some languages can have up 30+ genders for words. The concept is hard to wrap around, but its true
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