Ok, I didn't want to do it in this thread but I will give you explanations about the French grammar.
The first thing that you must understand is that every nouns and adjectives must be either masculine or feminine, there is no neutral type in your language (in the rest of the answer I will use the letter 'M' for masculine and 'F' for feminine).
So the '
a' or '
an' can have two possible translations in french : '
a' can be '
un' (M) or '
une' (F) and '
an' doesn't exist, you can always put '
une' or '
un' before a noun.
Examples :
-
a lion =
un lion (M)
-
a giraffe =
une girafe (F)
-
an animal =
un animal (M)
-
an apple =
une pomme (F)
Then there is '
the' which has three possible translations '
le' (M) '
la' (F) and '
l' ' which is a kind of equivalent for '
an'.
Examples :
-
The lion =
Le lion
-
The giraffe =
La girafe
-
The animal =
L'animal
Then come '
he' = '
il', '
she' = '
elle' and '
it' has no translation because we use '
he' or '
she' for everything even animals or objects. So we don't need the '
it'.
Examples :
-
The lion,
it is the king of the jungle. =
Le lion,
il est le roi de la jungle.
-
The giraffe,
it has a very long neck. =
La girafe,
elle a un cou très long.
-
The telephone,
it is ringing. =
Le téléphone,
il sonne. (M)
-
The room,
it is beautiful. =
La pièce,
elle est belle. (F)
And finally the last thing is '
they' which have two translations, '
ils' (M) and '
elles' (F) and this is only in this case that the we apply the rule that KA101 found a bit arch-conservative. You will understand quickly with an example that there is a problem because of our two possible translations.
Examples :
- Lions,
they live in the savanna. = Les lions,
ils vivent dans la savane. (M)
- Giraffes,
they live in the savanna. = Les giraffes,
elles vivent dans la savane. (F)
Now maybe you will see the next problem, when you have these animals in the same sentence, in english there is no problem you always use '
they', but in french what do we do ? Shall we use '
ils' because of lions (M) or '
elles' because of giraffes (F) or something else but there is not a such word.
Lions and giraffes,
they both live in the savanna. = Les lions et les girafes,
ils/
elles(?) vivent tous les deux dans la savane. (wrong)
Here is the problem. You have to choose '
ils' or '
elles' you can't put them together like I did else the sentence is non sense. So that's why we learn this rule asap, and this last tells us that when we encounter this kind of case where you have both M and F nouns you must use '
ils' (M).
So the example become :
Lions and giraffes,
they both live in the savanna. = Les lions et les girafes,
ils vivent tous les deux dans la savane. (correct)
Don't ask me why, it's an old rule instated by Richelieu under the king Louis XIII during the XVII century, I supposed he had to make a choice and he chose '
ils' instead of '
elles'.
So my explanations were a bit false in this answer :
Thanks, but in France we always use “he” as the default gender because it's an old rule that we learn as soon as possible when we study french language. Use “she” will be to weird and will be confusing for most of the people, we will consider it as an grammatical mistake.
Because as you see it's not really concern '
he' but more '
they' and only in certains cases. But in order to expose you the problem, I had to explain a lot of things before otherwise it's a bit hard to understand without.
And to finish, as far as I know there is only ONE word in french which we can be consider as “neutral” and it's '
an afternoon' because you can both say '
un après-midi' (M) or '
une après-midi' (F). But as you see there is no other word than '
une' or '
un', people have to choose between the one they prefer and it's not consider as a grammatical fault.
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Topic: Some questions about the code (Read 3899 times)