Grammatical Gender Assignment

Did you know that the only way to tell the gender of a French noun is its determiners? That is, the 'the' or 'a' words, i.e. the definite and indefinite articles before a noun (also, by adjectives and pronouns).

 

In French a noun may either be feminine or masculine, be it inanimate, conceptual, or living. These are either/or semantic opposites: the thing implied must be of one gender or the other, as follows:-

le for masculine nouns, les for plural (le canard, les canards);

la for feminine nouns, les for plural (las vache, les vaches).

(indefinite articles:- un, une, des)

This is not exclusive to French, but part of all Romance languages. However this apparently arbitrary classification arose is cause for wonder, even by its mother-tongue speakers to whom it comes so naturally there being nothing obvious towards why it ought to be so.

The subject interested me as, being a speaker of Castellano (Spanish), I sometimes struggle to use the correct grammatical gender: masculine, feminine, or (scantly used) neuter. It spurred me to think a little more on how it is used. 

Unlike French, the conundrum is not quite so great in Castellano since a large many so nouns end in either a or o (feminine; masculine), thus gender can be discerned at sight most of the time. See 'LESSON II - GENDER' from my first instruction in Castellano via the Teach Yourself series:

LESSON II - GENDER from Spanish by N.Scarlyn Wilson, first printed and published
in 1939  by David McKay Company Inc. (predecessor to Random House) 

Difficulties aside there are clear advantages. For instance, take an everyday utterance ripe with nouns, pronouns and possessives,

el techo de mi casa y el de la que Ud. compra;

the roof of my house and (that of) the one you are buying.

Immediately you can see the Castellano is shorter; the roof is masculine, the house(s) is(are) feminine, such that when they are referred to again at the end it is clear which stands for what: – el, the roof, and la, the house. 

Incidentally, 'that of' may well be left out entirely in spoken English. In which case doubt is cast over whether it was a house or a roof the second speaker was buying. In Castellano we can see 'that of' is masculine and 'the one' is feminine, both are singular, and easy to understand. 

In addition to this, the items to which el or la stand for are not always obliged to reside in the same sentence. They can be repeated in order to summon that previously mentioned thing (masculine, feminine, singular, or plural). 

    

One has to admit the demonstratives shown in the example above are neater and yield greater capabilities than does our poor gender-less English.

ventanas; windows

el techo y las ventanas de mi casa y las de la que Vd. compra.

Now we see by las that it is the windows which the speaker is referring to and NOT the roof. 


A full phrase,

Fué el baño, los techos y las ventanas de mi casa y las de la que Vd. compra también que se dañaron, no la suya ni aquella;

It was the bathroom, the roofs and windows of my house and those of the one you are buying, too, that were damaged, not hers nor (yonder) that one over there.

From the English phrase we can't properly determine what 'those', 'the one', 'hers', 'that one', 'yonder' might be, and the bathrooms, houses, roofs, and windows are all ambiguously mixed into one (headache!). Here, with new prepositions, repeating the nouns, or an altogether rephrasing of the example would be necessary in order to be clear.  

Well, in making a long story short... wait, that's precisely what we can't do! Okay, maybe it's not all that and your reader will do well to coax it straight out into something more coherent, but it will never be made to reduce to the succinctness of the Castellano.