"micky" wrote in message
...
In alt.home.repair, on Tue, 25 Aug 2020 22:46:21 +0100, "Commander
Kinsey" wrote:

That was the second event in France for me. I asked for one pancake. Un
crepe. Apparently it's une crepe. Like a pancake can have a gender. =

Of course. Haven't you seen a boy crepe meet a girl crepe?

The seller actually looked very confused, then raised his eyebrows and =
held up one finger and said "une?"

I've always wondered why many languages (Latin, Greek, French, German are
the ones I know about) have the concept of gender for inanimate objects (as
opposed to for male/female people/animals). English chose to dispense with
gender (if it ever had it), and it's one less thing to learn.

Where I used to work, we had quite a few French people who were on work
exchange schemes. I asked one of them whether French people sometimes made
mistakes with gender, and how other people regarded mistakes like that. He
said it sounded slightly uneducated, but it was regarded as a very minor
mistake, like dropping an H in English. Apart from a very small number of
words which were identical (or sounded identical) but one was male and one
was female (*), it didn't affect intelligibility at all.

He said the thing which really *did* sound "theek as peegsheet" (his phrase)
was Belgians and Swiss who used their own words for "seventy", "eighty" and
"ninety" - septante, huitante, nonante instead of the cack-handed French
soixante-dix, quatre-vignts, quatre-vignts-dix. French people apparently
regard septante, huitante, nonante as "baby words".


(*) For example:

Le mer = sea
La mère = mother