Grammatical gender correspondence between French, Greek, and Spanish nouns

Abstract

Analyzing the extent to which grammatical gender corresponds between languages contributes to an understanding of language processing in the multilingual mind and guides teaching and learning methods. The present study provides a perspective on this by examining the bilingual and trilingual grammatical gender correspondence between nouns of two Romance languages, French and Spanish, and Greek. Here, correspondence refers to any combination of genders for nouns of the same meaning in translation. The samples considered comprise frequently spoken nouns, nouns of similar ending, and loan nouns of similar pronunciation. Computations involve Greek nouns in singular nominative with and without neuter, the latter to eliminate the handicap of two grammatical genders in French and Spanish compared to three genders in Greek. The results reveal that bilingual and trilingual feminine similarity is considerably greater than masculine similarity, and more so for loan nouns than for frequently spoken nouns. This is because Greek neuter corresponds primarily to French and Spanish masculine, owing mainly to neuter becoming masculine in modern Romance languages. A consideration of semantics with respect to abstractness and concreteness show that noun endings as well as semantics play a significant role in interlanguage gender correspondence between French, Greek, and Spanish.