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Gender neutral language in French: Difference between revisions

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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 demonstrates, no approach has achieved widespread acceptance among this category of nouns and adjectives. As discussed in the Demonstrative adjective-subchapter, one intuitive approach to creating a gender-neutral form involves voicing or devoicing the silent consonant of the masculine form while making it audible in the neologism. However, masculine words ending in a silent <nowiki><s> pose a challenge: when put in the feminine form, the <s> can either become a voiced sibilant [z] or a voiceless sibilant [s] (the outcome [ʃ] is irrelevant in this issue). This inconsistency means that the silent <s> of the masculine form can represent either a voiced or a voiceless sound. While the silent consonants of other words can simply be transformed into their voiceless counterparts to differentiate them from the feminine, creating gender-neutral forms from words like "antillais·e" and "bas·e" requires more careful consideration. If the feminine form is pronounced with a [s], the pronunciation of the gender-neutral form must be [z] to avoid homophony; conversely, if the feminine form is pronounced [z], the gender-neutral form's pronunciation must be [s] to maintain distinctiveness.</nowiki>


==== Endings with a rounded vowel in the masculine and '-_(l)le' in the feminine ====
==== Endings with a rounded vowel in the masculine and '-_(l)le' in the feminine ====
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