The CBC’s Canada Writes published an interview about OffQc today. Take a look when you get the chance. They asked me why it’s difficult to learn French the “traditional” way, how to keep your ears and eyes fresh, as well as some questions about me and the blog.
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When French borrows a word from English, it often becomes masculine in French. But when you’re listening to French spoken by the Québécois, have you noticed that some borrowed words became feminine instead?
Here are just seven of them:
- toast
- job
- joke
- pinotte
- sandwich
- traite
- bullshit!
Below are examples of how you could hear these words used. The examples were all written by Mario Bélanger in his book Petit guide du parler québécois, which I reviewed in an earlier entry.
For each example, I’ve included a translation into English.
Je veux une toast et un café.
I want toast and coffee.
Tu as une job qui te plaît.
(remember: tu as contracts to t’as in conversations)
You’ve got a job that you like.
C’est pas grave. C’est juste une joke.
It’s no big deal. It’s just a joke.
J’ai le goût de manger des pinottes.
I feel like eating peanuts.
Veux-tu une sandwich au jambon?
Do you want a ham sandwich?
C’est à mon tour de payer la traite.
It’s my turn to treat.
Cette publicité, c’est de la bullshit!
(bullshit is pronounced boulechitte)
This advertisement is bullshit!
For the words job and sandwich, a masculine form exists too (la job, le job; la sandwich, le sandwich). During regular, everyday conversations in Québec, you’re more likely to hear the feminine form. The masculine form of these two words appears more frequently in writing.
The reason for these being feminine is because they end with a consonant sound, which is more typical for feminine words in French, right?
Possibly, yes. It could be a combination of what you said as well as ending in a consonant sound that strikes the ear as more typically feminine.
Congrats on a little notice from CBC, Felix. Well-deserved. 🙂
The gender of French words borrowed from English (or other languages) is an interesting question. I seem to think I was once told that it often took its cue from what the gender of the French equivalent (if there was one) (eg, ‘job’ would be masculine because ’emploi’ is).
This theory doesn’t seem to hold up to scrutiny, at least not all the time. It seems like maybe this is an area of inconsistency. I Googled the question and I like this line quoted in an academic paper from France on the subject:
“Les raisons de la masculinisation ou de la feminisation sont complexe et largement mystérieuses.”
http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/30249173?uid=3738176&uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=21103147197513
Indeed. Can’t read the whole paper, so not sure what the author had to say in terms of trying to shed light on these mysteries. Also wonder if that quote is talking strictly about borrowed words from other languages or the general attribution of gender to new French words.
I always wondered how gender attribution happened to any words originally. Don’t remember them, but I seem to recall there are broad tendencies and what not. But I’d imagine like much of language, there was inconsistency, usage evolved through practice and eventually a dominant tendency established itself, eventually winning official stamp of approval from academia.
This question of why some borrowed words in Quebec usage have different uses of gender is interesting. Something like ‘job’ certainly isn’t a new borrowing, so you’d think it’s gender attribution would be entrenched. Came up with another link of a discussion where ‘job’ was highlighted as an example where gender use is different between France (masculine in this case) and Quebec (feminine).
http://projetbabel.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=16800&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0
If so, maybe in Quebec, you have the added wrinkle where people in writing are being influenced by use of masculine from France, but maybe historically in popular use in Quebec it’s been feminine?
It doesn’t seem plausible to me that a common noun borrowed from English would have its gender ascribed to it based on the gender of the word’s French equivalent. I find it unlikely that people would stop to consider these things while speaking. People may also not have even known what the French equivalent was, if it existed at all.
Are you maybe confusing this with how an organisation’s English (or other foreign) name is attributed a gender when it appears in French? For example, the BBC would be referred to as la BBC in French, in the feminine. That’s because BBC stands for British Broadcasting Corporation, and corporation is feminine in French. But this practice is for the names of organisations, not common nouns absorbed into the language’s lexicon.
Any insight as to why sandwich is traditionally masculine in France but feminine in Quebec?
I can’t provide any convincing argument other than to suggest that the ending of the word may have struck the ear as sounding feminine in gender when it was adopted.