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French personal pronouns (analogous to English I, you, he/she, we, they, etc.) reflect the person and number of their referent, and in the case of the third person, its gender as well (much like the English distinction between him and her, except that French lacks an inanimate third person pronoun it or a gender neutral they and thus draws this distinction among all third person nouns ...
This is a key difference from English: in English, possessive pronouns are inflected to indicate the gender and number of their antecedent — e.g., in "the tables are his", the form "his" indicates that the antecedent (the possessor) is masculine singular, whereas in the French les tables sont les siennes, "siennes" or its base form "sien ...
Second-language learners are often encouraged to memorize a modifier, usually a definite article, in conjunction with each noun—for example, a learner of French may learn the word for "chair" as la chaise (meaning "the chair"); this carries the information that the noun is chaise, and that it is feminine (because la is the feminine singular ...
Other nouns change meaning depending on which grammatical gender they are used in. For example, le critique (masculine) refers to a critic, while la critique (feminine) means criticism; le livre refers to a book, while la livre means the pound (in the sense of both weight and currency). Similarly, le voile means "veil", whereas la voile means ...
The feminine is often marked with the suffix -a, while masculine is often marked with -o (e.g., cirujano 'male surgeon' and cirujana 'female surgeon'); however, there are many exceptions often caused by the etymology of the word (la mano 'the hand' is feminine and el día 'the day' is masculine). [25]
E.g.: singular l'uovo, il dito; plural le uova, le dita ('the egg(s)', 'the finger(s)'), although singulars of the type dito and uovo and their agreements coincide in form with masculine grammatical gender and the plurals conform to feminine grammatical morphology.
Furthermore, some see evidence of the intentional preference of the masculine over the feminine. It has been argued that 17th-century grammaticians who wanted to assert male dominance worked to suppress the feminine forms of certain professions, leading to the modern-day rule that prefers the masculine over the feminine in the French language. [4]
For example, la boutique 'boutique' is a borrowing from French, in which it is also feminine. Further, its meaning is similar to more established Spanish noun la tienda 'shop', which is also feminine. La app 'app (in computing)' is a borrowing from English