Toppling the Grammar Patriarchy
'I still remember my sense of indignation when my high school French teacher told us about the rule: French nouns have a gender, even seemingly sexless ones like “table.” And if you had a mixed group of masculine and female nouns — say, a bunch of male students (étudiants) and female students (étudiantes) — you had to describe them, as a group, in the masculine.
“What if there are 99 female students and one male student?” I demanded.
It didn’t matter, the teacher said. What’s more, if you wrote a sentence about attractive (beaux) étudiants and attractive (belles) étudiantes, the adjective used to describe them had to be masculine, too: “Les étudiants et les étudiantes sont beaux.”
That was just the way French was, she said.
The sexism of that stung. And that was even before I discovered that one of the rationales for this rule in which one man trumped an infinite number of women was that “the masculine gender is deemed more noble than the feminine gender because of the superiority of man over woman.”'>>>
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/16/opinion/french-sexism-grammar-everybody.html?
= new reply since forum marked as read
it's feminine in spanish ("mesa"
, italian ("tavola" and also in latin ("mensa" .
sometimes the gender of a word fits some sort of stereotype, other times, not so much.
but not necessarily about the nobility of the gender etc etc. Grammatical gender is a bit of a mystery. Usually the natural gender if there is one will correspond in French (la reine, le roi), and I don't know of any cases where it doesn't, but not so in Latin, where "nauta," "poeta," "agricola" etc are masculine first-declension nouns, i.e. they have feminine forms but masculine natural gender.
Fortunately languages evolve, and many if not most professions, which were previously masculine, whatever the gender of the actual person (le docteur, le professeur), have developed feminine forms, in Quebec it seems moreso than in France, but there too. So the NYT article might be exaggerating for dramatic effect, or maybe the writer had a chauvinistic teacher, which is not hard to imagine.
In any case students are always interested in this so merci beaucoup! 
