Quelle horreur! French Speakers Can't Agree on Genders of French Nouns

Ooh la la! Dalila Ayoun, a professor in French Linguistic, found that native French speakers can't agree on the genders of French nouns:

Fifty-six native French speakers, asked to assign the gender of 93 masculine words, uniformly agreed on only 17 of them. Asked to assign the gender of 50 feminine words, they uniformly agreed only 1 of them. Some of the words had been anecdotally identified as tricky cases, but others were plain old common nouns.

Link (Photo: Cyril Plapied [Flickr]) - via Gadling


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If you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, I can suggest an inexpensive app
that I've recently made; it helps you 'internalize' the 'rules' of identifying the gender of 95% of french nouns.

www.reflexarium.com

Regards,
Sean
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C'est n'importe quoi, c'est des mots très facile a identifier, je crois pas que ça soit une étude sérieuse, même que d'après une normale cdf, c'est n'importe quoi! Tout le monde est capable de réponde avec un équart type de +- 2 maximum.
- Clouthhh
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Inanimate objects need genders so when we're using them as sex toys, we don't accidentally use the wrong ones.
Those French think of everything. Imagine not knowing what gender your ass burger was...
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Nothing about "speedo" is masculine.
I've had the same problem with gender taking Latin and Spanish. Latin is the worst because there's also the "Neuter" gender, which leans towards being masculine, but isn't really.
Maybe that's what speedo is...
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