Wednesday 17 August 2011

La langue française - On a funnier note

Divide the world into two genres, classify them into masculine and feminine, now permute and combine with singular and plural. Voila, you are ready with the language - French. Mind you, there is no rule as to what forms a masculine or feminine. Something on it that arose from my brain resembling the famous Mark Twain's writing on German: French is one short of German in not having the gender neute, which will proably make the learners raise their eyebrows, if not making them happy. Back to the note on la francaise, a man is a masculine but a woman is feminine. Well, this is not a great discovery which any species in the earth will know, until you read what follows next. A man turns feminine when he is referred as a person (une personne). Along with that, he/she has the head which is feminine (la tete), a masculine nose (le nez) and a similar reasonless gender classification for the whole rest of the anatomy. And in the case of feminine, feminisme is masculine! Now no patience lies in me to explain the rest, nor do I have much knowledge . What I happened to write is only 0.000000..1% of what the language is all about. Things like these make me wonder who would have had such a cerebral structure, interest and time to create rules for a language on these lines. Inspite of all these contradictions, this language is a poetic one requiring a calculative mind and a good memory to become fluent at, as well as to discover a new world. A definite and enjoyable learning for those who do not get discouraged. 

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