Backstop

[Pérou Flaquettes]

I wonder if the preference for la blockchain reflects the now largely abandoned French attempts to make la chaîne de blocs a thing.

PF, the Bitcoin thread discusses the blockchain.

I think you’re right to assume that. 2 things here:

- "Blockchain" was preferred in practice to the clunky "la chaîne de blocs" most certainly because it’s much easier to say, so it’s stuck for convenience reasons.

- the technology industry generally keeps the English word. French translations are often coined and some are used alongside the English one but they rarely end up superseding the English word (maybe they do with the very technical stuff, the terminology they use in engineering schools and so on, but not with the general public).

The word order in French (= the feminine "chaîne" goes before the masculine "bloc") won the day although "blockchain" is officially androgynous and the masculine ("le blockchain") is also used but seemingly far less (Google occurrences).

[Pérou Flaquettes]

Good question. I'm interested too. Why, in French, is "le weekend" male, but "la fin de semaine" female?

Ah, gender assignation from foreign words into French, at long last a proper subject on these boards! I once did a short talk on that for the Alliance Française in Dubai about 25 yrs ago, not the long stuffy sort of lecture that the AF regularly inflicts on its long-suffering members (well, in Newcastle anyway, so stuffy in fact it's all falling apart, no programme for the last 2 yrs I think, it really needs jazzing up that thing but I'm digressing, sorry) but something short and informal, it was a workshop type of presentation, there was other linguistic & cultural stuff in my presentation too, thank God for the audience it wasn’t just about genders. I subsequently did similar presentations for my 6th form students and for other AF people, a sort of breakaway group of dissidents. I’ll try to find my notes but it was mostly in French so I’ll need to translate them, I'l have to locate them first, they are somewhere in my mess but not sure where. I’ll try to write something in English about it later but more likely tomorrow.

Weekend and "fin de semaine" mean 2 different things (https://www.onetouchfootball.com/sho...=1#post1487442) but I know what you mean. It’s a vast issue, I could give you an "in a nutshell" reply but it needs developing, there are several factors at play.

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L’Académie Française used to play a role in the gender assignment of foreign/borrowed words/loanwords or even neologisms, but that’s long over, their influence has considerably waned (despite what many foreign media say, that AF still rules supreme over the French language, I wrote about this subject here in reply to a post from johnr.
I suppose rehashing the same old cliches is much easier than actually taking the bother to research a subject, talk to experts and challenge one’s own preconceptions, more clicks too).

Several factors determine the grammatical gender of a foreign word. In no particular order although as they’re all inter-connected.

[Nb: we’re only talking here of words who came into French with no existing alternative (at least first), for instance “Internet” or “background”, and stayed like that (“la toile” was later coined for l’Internet but comparatively little used). These terms are called “integral borrowings” (I think there are 6 different types of borrowings but let’s not get bogged down in arcane specifics!). Anglicisms such as “fashion” (une fashion, une fashion victim etc.) or “challenge” (un challenge), “feedback” (un feed-back) fit the scope of our discussion but won’t be considered here as a French word was either already in use when they were assimilated into French or was soon created (respectively: “une mode”, “un défi”, “un retour”). By and large anyway, they immediately adopted the gender of the French word they superseded or co-existed with.

Also, I’ll focus on English words here as if the word is borrowed from a language with genders, it’ll keep that gender. Eg the Spanish words “el patio”, “el embargo” (le patio, l’embargo) are also masculine in French. Something like 90% of the foreign words assimilated today into French verbatim or with a slight modification come from English (a language with no grammatical gender, not any longer anyway) but it wasn’t always the case: up to the middle of the 20th century, the number 1 language French borrowed from was Italian.]


This is how the genderisation process goes in French for words borrowed from English:

#1. Usage – media, Internet, everyday communication. Ascribing a gender is a quick process, it happens way before the foreign word has been formally picked up by the lexicographers of the main French dictionaries. The latter may influence the gender direction but it’s very rare, in practice they just “vet” the gender adopted by society as it’s already been firmly established by then. (Now, in some cases, during the initial phase of the assimilation into the French language, the foreign word may acquire both genders or change genders but quickly a dominant one emerges and sticks. Some may officially be bigender in dictionaries/glossaries etc., as we’ve seen with MsD’s “blockchain”, but 1 gender is usually favoured over another).

The "Commission d'Enrichissement de la Langue Française" (the Enrichment Commission for the French Language), the terminology/translation arm of the French Culture Ministry, can also provide guidance, although its main function lies more in the translation of foreign words into French but there are people on their 19-member board and sub-teams who are connected to the Académie Française so they occasionally add their voice to the debate (too rarely though, or they do in a very academic, high-brow peripheral way, on Arte or France Inter/France Culture. It's a great shame they're not more proactive as they do a good job and their website FranceTerme is useful but they don’t put themselves about enough IMO. It looks to me that they are quite happy to meet once a month in some gilded room of the Ministry of Culture located in the Palais Royal in Paris, possibly have a good gueuleton, and a few burps, at the Grand Véfour restaurant downstairs in between their morning and afternoon sessions. Well, the 19 members are volunteers after all, and not spring chickens, but their many committees and sub-committees don’t work pro bono).

Way after, the Académie Française may chip in too but as they’re not the quickest out of the blocks as you can imagine and it can take years before they pipe in. One of their main tasks is to write a dictionary – or, I should say, rewrite and update previous versions of their dictionaries, the 1st one was started nearly 400 years ago – so at some point, when they include the borrowed word (and they do include a fair number of them, they’re not terminally hopeless fuddy-duddies) they have to settle on a gender. AFAIK, they always side with the common usage.
They enter the long-settled debate via their main linguists (not Academicians themselves usually but mostly collaborators), especially linguists-lexicographers Alain Rey and Henriette Walter (France’s most famous linguists with Alain Bentolila or Claude Hagège – the latter being an interesting character, I love hearing him on Arte, France Inter/Culture etc. even if he is very set in his ways (he is a staunch defender of the French language and can come across as a bit of an enemy of English. Hagège speaks (or is knowledgeable) about fifty languages, including Italian, English, Arabic, Chinese, Hebrew, Russian, Greek, Guarani, Hungarian, Navajo, Nocte, Punjabi, Persian, Malay, Hindi, Malagasy, Fula, Quechua, Tamil, Tetela, Turkish and Japanese. . Hagège follows in the footsteps of famous polyglot-linguists like Georges Dumézil, these linguists were regulars in the much-regretted TV programme Apostrophes, on literature, language etc.)

#2. Done via the gender already assigned in:

a) Francophone countries
b) Countries with a Romance language
c) Countries with non-Romance languages

French will look to see if the foreign word has already been gendered elsewhere in the Francophonie, particularly in Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, esp. Canada/Québec for obvious reasons (Québec is hot on translating English words into French but initially when the loan word arrived it needed a gender, and even when it’s been given an official French Canadian translation that the admin has to adopt etc., many loan words still continue to be used alongside the official translation). There are exceptions here too: “job” is always masculine in French (eg “il a un bon job”), but bigender in Canadian French depending on a number of things (detailed here).

If no luck with a), options b) and c) are looked at.

[Pérou Flaquettes]

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#3. Via morphological, phonological, syntactic criteria, semantic closeness and other association/similarity with existing words in French. However, there’s no set convention about it as it happens in osmosis with #1 and #2. Prefixes or suffixes, or parts of words for instance have an influence too.

If the first part of a word is masculine, eg le workflow (work= le travail), the word is likely to be masculine, or the second part, eg le “buzzword” (word is masc. in French, “le mot”; buzz neutral originally, it is masc. post importation, “le buzz”, but could have gone either way).

If 2 parts of a word have different genders, such as MsD’s “blockchain”, word order prevails, in theory. That said, some loan words end up having both genders, such as MsD’s “blockchain” (a newbie), or much older ones such as “interview” (une entrevue, un entretien in standard French) although “interview” is almost always feminine in modern French, unsurprisingly maybe as it’s originally a French word (was “une entreveuë” in Middle French) that was adopted in English in the 1500s and then sent back to France as “interview” centuries later (a common toing and froing pattern, celebrated linguist Henriette Walter has written on this extensively, eg in her excellent book L’aventure des mots français venus d’ailleurs, 1997). Word order is important in a compound, eg (le) “talk-show” ended masculine in French (talk: fem., show: masc.), so did (la) “pole-position” (pole: masc. position: fem.) but sometimes it’s just done intuitively or for euphonic reasons.

Gender markers, whether objective or cultural, can be difficult to detect, sometimes there is no rhyme or reason to the choice, it happens naturally and can be counter-intuitive. eg (le) “weekend”, both “week” and “end” are feminine in French, yet it ended up masculine. Not surprising as most English loan words in French are masculinised, there is a bias towards masculinisation.

The nature of the domain influences choices too. Many new borrowed words from English (post 1980) relate to business, IT, technology, and the creative industries (show-business, cinema etc.) and will often, by default or gender bias, end up being masculine, even when it makes little sense sometimes. The following words should theoretically all have been feminine but were defaulted to the masculine: un clip (une vidéo in French), un trailer (une bande-annonce), un remake (une nouvelle version), un showroom (une salle d’exposition).

Internet is masc. possibly because of “le réseau Internet” (réseau = network) and the fact it’s a fusion of “International” and “network” (le réseau), both masculine in French but also possibly because of the geeky nature of IT probably influenced the choice of gender, masculine has a tendency to win too. Sometimes, it goes back a long way despite the apparent modernity, eg (le) fax: “télécopie” was chosen in French as a translation but unsatisfactorily as it also means “telex” (a different meaning), so the word "fax" stuck. But as it has Latin roots and the word (le) “fac-similé” (= identical reproduction) was used in French way before fax was ever invented it only made sense that “fax” was masculinised.

Gender assignment can be tricky to analyse. Sometimes you just have to accept that there are no objective reasons to justify a choice. When the explanation is not blatant, the usual suspects such as the heritage of a patriarchal society, male domination in technology etc. come to mind. There is indeed a cultural bias lurking somewhere in the gender-determination process notwithstanding the logic of the process and the many exceptions.

This is interesting too (although no mention of gender assignment by usage, my point #1, or through another language, my #2, which I find odd): Gender in words borrowed from one language by another