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If you look at the following chart:

chaude amour

You'll find that between 'chauds amours' and 'chaudes amours' the former does not even exist. In the singular there is some debate between 'chaude amour' and 'chaud amour', but in the long course of history usually 'chaud amour' predominates though 'chaude amour', for example, in the early 2000s was more common. In the dictionary it says here:

,,Amour, après avoir longtemps hésité entre les deux genres, est considéré par les grammaires classiques comme masculin au singulier et féminin au pluriel. Le genre masculin semble aujourd'hui se généraliser pour les deux nombres`` (cf. aussi Littré, rem. et Grev. 1964, § 253)

I mentioned this to my language exchange partner and she was not aware of it though she admitted that she never says 'chauds amours'. She was dismissive of the rule as a useless detail. My question is are French speakers aware of this? Are they aware that some nouns (I think there are a few more) switch genders as they switch number? If I were to say 'chauds amour' would that leap out at them in the same way that "I require that he remains in the park" leaps out to English speakers? So far I've never met an monolingual English speaker that understands why the sentence "I require that he remains in the park" is ungrammatical?

Roger V.
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bobsmith76
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    Related https://french.stackexchange.com/q/8281/358. Words that are masculin in the singular and feminine the plural. – None Jun 05 '23 at 09:34
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    The related answer doesn't answer this part of your question : "Are they aware that some nouns (I think there are a few more) switch genders as they switch number?" so I'll add that it is a point that is mentioned in secondary education in France, some people forget, some people remember, and since there's no rule attached, it's just a matter of tradition, it's not really important. – None Jun 05 '23 at 11:09
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    @bobsmith76 can you edit the Q title so that it reflects what you're really asking? The part about leaping out doesn't really make sense in the first place. "Chaud(e)s amours" is eminently written French, not something that comes up in conversations. – guillaume31 Jun 05 '23 at 12:14
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    Does this answer your question? Délice et délices – Toto Jun 05 '23 at 17:16
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    Just FYI: “I require that he remains in the park” is not ungrammatical to many speakers of British English. North Americans in general will expect the subjunctive, and many Brits would say ‘should remain’, but there are also quite a few native speakers who would find ‘that he remains’ quite natural. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Jun 05 '23 at 17:34
  • @Guillaume, the title: are the French aware that etc etc, is too long a title. – bobsmith76 Jun 05 '23 at 20:25
  • @bobsmith76 not much longer than the current one - which is vague and sounds like you're asking for word examples or a rule. – guillaume31 Jun 05 '23 at 21:54
  • @Janus, are you sure? "require that he remain" has no hits in google ngram https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=require+that+he+remains&year_start=1800&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3 – bobsmith76 Jun 06 '23 at 01:39
  • @bobsmith76 No hits ?, I got quite a few!: require that he remain. /// https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/getting-in-the-subjunctive-mood – None Jun 06 '23 at 05:44
  • yea, 'require that he remain' is the subjunctive. 'require that he remains' is the indicative which does not exist. Janus said that the indicative is not ungrammatical to many Brits. – bobsmith76 Jun 06 '23 at 07:51
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    I did some more research. I have access to the NOW corpus where you can actually locate the full context of hits. "require that he remain" only appears once in a corpus of 17 billion and "require that he remain" 0 times, so it's a rare expression. "demand that he go" however appears 17 times, and 'demand that he goes' appears 7 times. However, of those 7, 4 of them are from countries which only adopted English in the last 100 years, that is, India and Africa, so they have different standards obviously. There were 3 instances though from British papers. So, Janus, you might be right. – bobsmith76 Jun 06 '23 at 07:59
  • I remember learning in grade school that "amour, délice et orgue" fit the category of being "masculin au singulier et féminin au pluriel". – MasB Jun 16 '23 at 10:22

2 Answers2

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Most French speakers don't know

There are, as far as I know, three nouns in total that switch from masculine in the singular to feminine in the plural: amour (love), délice (delight) and orgue (organ, the musical instrument).

In French noun genders tend to be more visible in singular than in plural as for a plural form it can only be seen through the agreement of an adjective:

Des voitures (some cars) : feminine

Des camions (some trucks) : masculine

Des voitures garées (some parked cars)

Des camions garés (some parked trucks)

Even in this example, you can see that the agreement of the adjective only matters in the written form. It is silent otherwise.

Now, you can combine this with the relative rarity of the plural form of these three nouns to see why most people never ran into a situation where this factoid mattered the slightest.

Now on this very website you are going to see a bias as people here are way more interested in grammatical peculiarities that the average Joe but we need to admit that is still a niche center of interest.

I think you could make a nice trivia question about this!

Anne Aunyme
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    Probably everyone has stumbled upon these words at one point or another in their education though... How many remember is another question, but "most don't know" is a bold statement. – guillaume31 Jun 05 '23 at 12:11
  • Many don't known, and even more don't care. – XouDo Jun 05 '23 at 12:18
  • Also it's not everyday we speak of orgues or use the word délices. I would argue that the case of amour is more familiar. – Frank Jun 05 '23 at 14:29
  • @Anne, as for trivia question, is this a coincidence or are you referring to the last question I posed on this site? In any case, thanks for the input. – bobsmith76 Jun 05 '23 at 20:23
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    @Xoudo, reminds of the response I got to one of my DM's to a friend: DNDK (don't know, don't care) – bobsmith76 Jun 05 '23 at 20:23
  • @bobsmith76 It was indeed a reference to your last question :) – Anne Aunyme Jun 05 '23 at 22:28
  • @Anne, btw, in my French group tonight someone actually did ask a trivia question? What is the only word in French which ends in 'ette' and is masculine? Since I'm working on a database of the gender of French nouns, I was able to refer to my database and find 'squelette'. But also found quartette and quintette. I then was able to follow up with my own trivia question: what word in French begins with 'f' has three letters and is only found in one fixed expression in use today? – bobsmith76 Jun 06 '23 at 01:44
  • @bobsmith76 "bal-musette" and sadly I have recently seen the answer to your other question. – Anne Aunyme Jun 06 '23 at 03:26
  • @Anne, 'musette' - cool, didn't know that one. And yea, I forgot that I already posted that question. – bobsmith76 Jun 06 '23 at 05:37
  • @guillaume31 It is not enough to stumble upon these words, you have to stumble upon them in their plural form with an adjective that marks the gender agreement. I personally only know this because my grandparents told me (not as "something you need to know", more like "hey look at this funny fact") – Anne Aunyme Jun 06 '23 at 14:01
  • @ bobsmith76 : the French word that begins with 'f', has three letters and is only found in one fixed expression in use today is '"fur" in "au fur et à mesure". – Graffito Jun 06 '23 at 15:35
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It's mostly unknown, except in literature, poetry and songwriting.

The reason is, it's pretty rare to use "amours" in plural form in speech, even more with an adjective that sounds different when it's feminine. Even if everyone used it correctly, it would be hard to pick up the rule by listening alone. In my opinion that's why that rule is not very known and rarely applied.

Teleporting Goat
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  • And ... speaking is not a game of mentally juggling grammatical rules to be perfectly correct either ... – Frank Jun 05 '23 at 14:31
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    Don't you sometime speak of "mes amours de jeunesse" ? What is really rare is to combine the plural with an adjective whose pronunciation depends on gender, i.e. "de grandes amours. – Graffito Jun 05 '23 at 17:15
  • @Graffito I feel that for amours, we know. We've seen it be feminine before, maybe we are unsure, but it's not a big surprise if we hear it and we would go along with it. – Frank Jun 06 '23 at 00:22
  • @Graffito Yes that's what I meant, "mes amours de jeunesse" doesn't have anything that makes it sound feminine in speech :) The only phrase I could find that comes up naturally is "premiers/premières amours", and it seems to be more frequent in the masculine. – Teleporting Goat Jun 06 '23 at 13:14