One of the main differences between English and French is that the French language has genders. In French, there are masculine nouns and feminine nouns. Sometimes nouns are either feminine or masculine and sometimes masculine nouns have their feminine form. To find the feminine of a noun, you generally add “e” at the end of the masculine noun. But this rule doesn’t apply to a lot of nouns.
In this lesson we will study the genders of homographs and homophones. But first we have to define what homographs and homophones are.
Homographs are words that have the same spelling and a different meaning. Homophones are words that have the same pronunciation with different meaning or/and different spelling.
Examples of homographs:
Est-ce que tu
as un
as ?
Do you have an ace? The first “as” is a form of the verb “avoir”; we don’t pronounce the final “s”. The second “as” means “an ace”; the final “s” is pronounced. Both have the same spelling, but they have different meaning and different pronunciation.
Examples of homophones: