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Gender neutral language in French: Difference between revisions
Gender neutral language in French (view source)
Revision as of 19:30, 18 December 2023
, 6 months ago→Endings with silent consonant x {\displaystyle x} in the masculine and audible consonant x {\displaystyle x} in the feminine
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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> | 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> | ||
==== Endings with a rounded vowel in the masculine and '-_(l)le' in the feminine ==== | |||
{| class="wikitable" | {| class="wikitable" | ||
|+ | |+Endings with a rounded vowel (♂︎) and '-_(l)le' (♀︎) | ||
! | ! | ||
! | !masculine | ||
!feminine | |||
!analytic gender neutral | |||
!synthetic gender neutral | |||
|- | |- | ||
!-eau/-elle | !-eau/-elle | ||
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|vieilleux, vieuille | |vieilleux, vieuille | ||
| | | | ||
| | |} | ||
{| class="wikitable" | |||
|+ | |||
! | ! | ||
! colspan="4" |Endings with consonant <math>x</math> (♂︎) and consonant <math>x</math> with phonetic change triggered by presence of final "-e" (♀︎) | ! colspan="4" |Endings with consonant <math>x</math> (♂︎) and consonant <math>x</math> with phonetic change triggered by presence of final "-e" (♀︎) | ||
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|naïfive | |naïfive | ||
| | | | ||
| | |} | ||
{| class="wikitable" | |||
|+ | |||
! | ! | ||
! colspan="4" |Some examples of gender neutral nouns from irregular substantives | ! colspan="4" |Some examples of gender neutral nouns from irregular substantives | ||