I am a beginer in learning French. I came to see this sentence somewhere.
"La cravate" - The tie.
I am curious why 'the tie' is a feminine word?
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3Most English nouns do not have grammatical gender, so what do you mean? Related : Is there any general rule to determine the gender of a noun based on its spelling?, Comment fait-on pour reconnaître et mémoriser le genre des noms ?.– NoneCommented Jul 28, 2017 at 15:46
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My question is based on the answer given by @Circeus, 'nontechnical words whose pronunciation ends in /-at/ tends to be strongly feminine'– Shubham BCommented Jul 28, 2017 at 15:49
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2@ShubhamBhave The word "cravate" ends in "ate" in the spelling, which means /at/ in the pronunciation (notice the slashes). Circeus means if you actually hear /at/ at the end of a word it's probably feminine.– Luke Sawczak ♦Commented Jul 28, 2017 at 15:55
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Not every word ending in e in French is feminine by a long shot. There is not always a reason. Are we going to go through the entire dictionary?– LambieCommented Jul 29, 2017 at 17:39
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1 Answer
I'd wager that's because in French, baring other factors (e.g. certain suffixes), nontechnical words whose pronunciation ends in /-at/ tends to be strongly feminine. If that specific sense was borrowed from German, it's probably borrowed in the same gender (Krawatte is also feminine in German).
It's however not entirely clear what the sequence of borrowing was (it's ultimately from Croatian hrvat, which also gave, well, croate).
Otherwise, this is really threading into the most arbitrary aspect of language (especially if you're gonna follow this up with "why are words in /-at/ feminine?"). Asking "why does this language function differently" is typically not much more useful a question as asking "why do different languages exist". French has grammatical gender. No matter what the word is, if it's a noun, it's going to have a gender, and this sort of categorization is going to have some level of arbitrariness by definition.
