Gender issues

Last month Denis and I were on the dessert course in an intimate corner of the dining room of the Vieux Logis, an extremely charming hotel in the Périgord village of Tremolat. It was late, and only one other dining couple lingered in our nook. They were engaged in earnest conversation with the waiter about the seemingly endless and delicious dishes that had been served throughout the course of the dinner. Madame was in the midst of discussing a sauce when she stumbled over the correct article (le or la) to use with the word coriandre.

I couldn't believe my ears, because this was the second time I had seen a French person unsure of whether the world coriandre was masculine or feminine. The other was my friend Aleth, who admitted it was feminine, but impetuously continues to treat it as masculine. "I don't know why, but for me, coriandre is notfeminine," she declared heatedly. Such a hotheaded, devil-may-care attitude is hardly characteristic of the more general French attitude toward their language, whose tortuous vicissitudes they prefer to treat with hushed deference and obey unquestioningly.

In this case, the waiter, believing it to be la coriandre, but not wanting to seem didactic with his customer, rushed to the kitchen and swept back out in a rush, holding in his arms as reverentially as a luscious pièce de résistance, a large dictionary.

At this point, I was in heaven, because two of my favorite topics--food and language--were being debated. "Only in France..." I breathed to myself in delight, would a waiter come out of the kitchen with a dictionary.

Of course, the waiter was right. La coriandre it is, always has been, and probably always will be, knowing the ultimate conservatism of the French when it comes to their mother tongue. The conversation went on to discuss the gender of millefeuilles, that classic French pastry consisting of a layer of custardy pastry cream sandwiched between layers of puff pastry. The name of the pastry translates as thousand layers (mille=thousand; feuilles=leaves, layers, pages). Now, mille is masculine, and feuilles is feminine. What, then, is the gender of the composite noun millefeuilles? That was the question of the hour. By this time we had joined the conversation.

Anglo logic would have you think like this: since mille is an adjective modifying feuilles, the noun, the gender of the compound noun should follow the gender of the noun, feuilles. Right?

Wrong! There is nothing logical about the French language, never mind that Descartes was supposedly the father of logic. Although feuilles is feminine, millefeuilles is masculin. (Go figure.) And, it does not have a hyphen (also discussed at the dinner table).

French is a notoriously difficult language. French students are always moaning about the intricacies of conjugating all 15 French verb tenses. But in reality, only around 3 or 4 of those tenses are used in everyday language, so it's not so bad. However, there's no way of skirting the gender issue. Sadly for us neuter-speaking Angloids, every French noun is either feminine or masculine, and all adjectives have corresponding feminine and masculine forms. The gender of the adjective must agree with the gender of the noun or pronoun it is modifying.

The bitter truth is that those of those with English for a mother tongue are faced with numerous split-second gender decisions every time we open our mouths to speak even a single sentence. The effect can be paralyzing, as in when you spend so much time rehearsing your sentence in your mind to make sure that you've remembered all the correct gender forms, that by the time you open your mouth to speak, your interlocutor has up and gone 5 minutes ago.

The gender of French nouns defies any logic, making it terribly difficult to learn. I'll give you the best example of just how illogical all this gender stuff is by talking real gender words. What do you think is the gender of the French word (identical to the English) for the male sex organ? Surprise! It's male. Now, what about the gender of the female sex organ? Male. Gotcha! How about sein, the French word for "breast" ? Male again. See what I mean? I don't know about you, but I'm sure that whoever thought up all this gender stuff wasn't a woman.

In fact, you don't really learn French word genders, you just sort of memorize them as you go along, bit by painful bit, until you don't have to think about it any more. In fact, in my case, I memorize the correct sound, more than anything. After you repeat it the right way often enough, the wrong way just sounds wrong. But that doesn't prevent me from messing up many times each day, as I try out new words or get flustered or tired, both circumstances which instantly diminish my capacity for remembering correct word gender.

Even though I have an above-average aptitude for language, I'm not sure I'll ever lick the gender issue. Jane Birkin, the English wife of the much-loved (now deceased) French singer Serge Gainsbourg, has lived in France for over 30 years and speaks French--well, not quite fluently. Ms. Birkin is famous here for (among other things) still messing up her word genders after all this time. That's the bad news. The good news is that the French love her for it. And when I'm tired or flustered, a little indulgence is just what I need. Oh Lord, please don't let me be misunderstood!

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