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Gender neutral language in French: Difference between revisions
Gender neutral language in French (view source)
Revision as of 19:26, 18 December 2023
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The '-aine' suffix has gained popularity. In monosyllabic words such as 'brun·e', however, the comprehension might be hindered, which could explain why we rather find 'bran', that conserves the nasality of the final vowel, only changing its place of articulation. Words with a '-ien/-ienne' (and obviously also '-ain/-aine') suffix cannot form a synthetic gender neutral form with '-aine', as it would result in a word that is pronounced the exact same way as the feminine one (cf. 'citoyenne'). Here again, the synthetical neutral forms created with '-an' only retain a masculine phonetic trait (i. e. its manner of articulation — vocalic — and its nasality trait — which is positive). Theoretically, this could lead to similar issues as discussed in the Endings from Latin '-or' and '-rix'-subchapter. The same could be true with synthetic gender neutral forms ending in '-aine', but this time in favour of the feminine. However, even though the suffix '-aine' could sound feminine, the resulting form is still easily discriminable from the original one, since the vowels implied are oral and not nasal, and can thus more difficultly be taken for mispronunciations — while 'écrivan', 'citoyan' and 'bran' could (for more information see the Indefinite and definite article-subchapter). | The '-aine' suffix has gained popularity. In monosyllabic words such as 'brun·e', however, the comprehension might be hindered, which could explain why we rather find 'bran', that conserves the nasality of the final vowel, only changing its place of articulation. Words with a '-ien/-ienne' (and obviously also '-ain/-aine') suffix cannot form a synthetic gender neutral form with '-aine', as it would result in a word that is pronounced the exact same way as the feminine one (cf. 'citoyenne'). Here again, the synthetical neutral forms created with '-an' only retain a masculine phonetic trait (i. e. its manner of articulation — vocalic — and its nasality trait — which is positive). Theoretically, this could lead to similar issues as discussed in the Endings from Latin '-or' and '-rix'-subchapter. The same could be true with synthetic gender neutral forms ending in '-aine', but this time in favour of the feminine. However, even though the suffix '-aine' could sound feminine, the resulting form is still easily discriminable from the original one, since the vowels implied are oral and not nasal, and can thus more difficultly be taken for mispronunciations — while 'écrivan', 'citoyan' and 'bran' could (for more information see the Indefinite and definite article-subchapter). | ||
==== Endings with silent consonant <math>x</math> in the masculine and audible consonant <math>x</math> in the feminine ==== | |||
{| class="wikitable" | {| class="wikitable" | ||
|+ | |+Endings with silent (♂︎) and audible consonant (♀︎) | ||
! | ! | ||
! | !masculine | ||
!feminine | |||
!analytic gender neutral | |||
!synthetic gender neutral | |||
|- | |- | ||
!-t/-te | !-t/-te | ||
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|babasse | |babasse | ||
|base | |base | ||
|- | |} | ||
As the table shows, no approach has achieved any popularity among this type of nouns and adjectives. As discussed in the Demonstrative adjective-subchapter, one intuitive way of creating a gender neutral form consists in voicing or devoicing the silent consonant of the masculine form while making it audible in the neologism. Masculine word that have an final silent '-s' ending constitute a challenge: when put in the feminine form, the <nowiki><s> can turn into different sibilants: [s], [z] (and [ʃ]). The 's' grapheme of the masculine which behaves as a silent segment can thus hide either a voiced sibilant or a voiceless one. So, while the silent consonants of the other words can simply be transformed into their voiceless homolog to be differentiated from the feminine, to form gender neutral neologisms from words such as 'antillais·e' and 'bas·e', the pronunciation of the feminine form needs to be taken into account: if the feminine is pronounced with a [s], the pronunciation of the gender neutral form has to be [z]; if the feminine is pronounced [z], the gender neutral form's pronunciation must be [s] to avoid homophony.</nowiki> | |||
{| class="wikitable" | |||
|+ | |||
! | ! | ||
! colspan="4" |Endings with a rounded vowel (♂︎) and '-_(l)le' (♀︎) | ! colspan="4" |Endings with a rounded vowel (♂︎) and '-_(l)le' (♀︎) | ||