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Computers - Male or Female?A language teacher was explaining to her class that in French, nouns, unlike their English counterparts, are grammatically designated as masculine or feminine. For example, "House" in French, is feminine "Ia maison", "Pencil" in French, is masculine "le crayon". One puzzled student asked, "What gender is a computer?" The teacher did not know, and the word was not in her French dictionary. So for fun she split the class into two groups appropriately enough, by gender, and asked them to decide whether "computer" should be a masculine or a feminine noun. Both groups were required to give four reasons for their recommendation. The men's group decided that computer should definitely be of the feminine gender
("Ia computer"), because: The women's group, however, concluded that computers should be masculine ("le
computer") because: |
Copyright Roy Dickason, October 2002 and April 2019. |