New answers tagged french
1
I don't have the answer, but the Spanish, Italian and Portuguese descendents of these Latin nouns are masculine, whereas the French, Provençal and Romanian equivalents are feminine. Some of the French ones (ardeur, honneur, odeur) went back to being masculine in the 16th century, but the only ones that are masculine today are labeur and honneur
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Words like je, le, lui are historically pronouns (meaning: they derive from Latin freestanding pronouns) and are treated orthographically as separate words, but from a synchronic point of view they are best treated as clitics. This goes also for the negative particle ne. In English you can say “I am not giving it to him” or “I am not giving him it”, but in ...
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