French Ambiguities, Part II (La - Le - Les - Whatever)

Why do nouns need sex?

Why LE chapeau but LA chemise? Why LA main but LE pied?

Who gave a gender to each and every noun in French and whatever for?

This must stump every student of the French language. At least in Spanish and Italian, it's pretty straightforward - if the noun ends in an "a", it's a pretty sure bet that it is a female noun. In French, however, there just seems to be no rhyme or reason why one noun is masculine, but another is feminine.

To make matters worse, the French act as though they have no idea what you are saying if you get the gender wrong; they don't understand the whole sentence if one gender is  wrong. I was given a key for the mailbox some time ago. I asked the guy, "ah, un seul cle?" ("ah, a single key?") - the guy looked at me as though I had two heads, with a look of complete bewilderment and confusion. He asked me to repeat. I repeated, twice, pointing at the key. Then it hit him and he says, "ah, UNE seule cle!" - Hello? Just because I got the UNE confused with UN, he had no idea what I was talking about? What about taking a bit of context into the equation?

It's not like the UNE and the UN are pronounced similarly, in which case I could just mumble the gender and hope to be understood. No, the UNE sounds very different from UN, unfortunately. I have an issue with the LA and LE as well. I am rather partial to LES personally, which cleverly and thankfully disguises the gender question - until you start writing, in which case all the other parts of the sentences have to change to accommodate the sex of the noun. Why so complex?

It's rather embarrassing when little kids get the gender right, but I cannot seem to retain the right sex for some of the words. It's like my friend S. was saying - foreigners walk around saying "je veux eau" - literally, I want wanter - and wonder why nobody understands. Whereas French kids learn words with definite articles, so "je veux de l'eau" (again, "I want water" but with extra complex grammatical rules added in for some incomprehensible reason).

Until someone can explain to me why nouns have sex and the reasons behind the assignment of said sex, I don't think I will ever get it right 100% - file this under another ambiguity uniquely French...

Loving Lunchtime Sans Kids

Here in France, elementary schools run 4 days a week - meaning, on Wednesdays the kids have the day off - so two days on, two days off. Though I like to joke that this arrangement is to prepare the kids for the 35-hour working week, it does make sense to me  to give the parents and the kids a break from the morning rush in the middle of the week. Of course, it's not an ideal situation for dual-working parents, but something tells me that it is assumed that the mother stays home...

Because the other thing about elementary schools here is that the kids have a choice of staying to eat at the school cafeteria or to eat at home. And to me, it appears that most kids do actually go home for lunch - I live across the street from school, and every school day at 11:30, there is a throng of moms and grandparents lining up to get into the school gates. Then again at 1:30 when the kids are brought back. This is sheer madness to me. 

Hana has already asked me a number of times if she can eat at home and my answer is invariably a firm "no". I cannot imagine, with all the "stuff" I have to do, to also worry about what to feed the kids that they would actually eat, and go back and forth to the school, all smack in the middle of the day! Granted, we live so close, but still, is it bad of me to see it as an intrusion on my me-time? Schools are supposed to feed them a nutritious balanced meal, right? Probably better than what I can prepare - though I like to cook nutritious meals, it is another thing altogether to ensure that they actually eat them, and I think ensuring that would be too stressful at lunch. Cute as they are (see picture above), I can quite do without them for one meal a day (no hysterics over who gets the pink cup, Manolee fingering all of Hana's food, drinks spilled, sleeves sullied, etc etc). So I feel quite justified in maintaining that firm "no".

So why is it that - whenever a mom asks me whether the kids lunch at home, my answer is habitually, "no, not today" - giving the somewhat misleading impression that they do sometimes... I feel somewhat sheepish, that it is something that I should be doing, a maternal duty that I am neglecting... Sigh. Supermom I am not, that is for sure.

French Ambiguities, Part I

I worked in new product development for 6 years. One of the things I would always jot down twice a year for my self-appraisals (for performance reviews) was: thriving in an ambiguous environment.

In France, I seem to face ambiguities left and right.

The cheek-kissing, that the French are so fond of, is just one example. Now, I rather like the kissing; it forces you to stop and acknowledge the person you are greeting, rather than a half-hearted "hey how are ya" while you are already going past the person. However, it's very ambiguous how many times you kiss the person's cheeks. At first I was told it was regional. Parisians, with the hustle and bustle that comes with big city life, kiss twice; the southern French kiss four times, and in some other regions like Brittany people kiss three times. No rhyme or reason why - at least nobody can explain to me why this is the case. Also aggravating is the fact that there always seems to be someone who lives by the exception - and I have often experienced that subtle jutting of the cheek only to be rebuffed, or puckering up only to be spurned. How do the French themselves know? Or do they just accept that occasional fleeting embarrassing nanosecond as a minor nuisance? Being a foreigner here, I rather hate the thought of performing a faux-pas, and always feel very embarrassed.

The French start kissing at a very early age. They kiss very freely. They kiss very frequently. The first time you are introduced to a someone on a street, they kiss you. You say goodbye to that person one minute later, there they are again, kissing you. And 99% of the time, it's a genuine kiss smack on the cheeks, not air kisses. Men do not shy away from kissing one another. By far the most kissing I ever saw done was at a New Year's Eve party, where there were 4 kisses to each and every person present - it was way over the top for me, not to mention exhausting (especially when they do not start eating dinner until after the midnight kisses!)

I'm ok with all the kissing. I just want to know how many to each person! Even with my American or English friends here we kiss now (hmm, but now that I think about it, we usually do two instead of three that is prevalent in Brittany - where did that come from?? As in, we-are-not-really-from-here mentality?). Kinda funny, but I guess when in Rome...! There has been no anti-kissing movement that I've heard of, even when the "gastro" viruses seem endemic, so I guess I just have to learn to deal with this ambiguity!