Can someone French explain this to me? This is a genuine question that has bugged me for a while.
Here is a picture…
of something that could be une voiture or un taxi.
So, before anyone has described it as one or the other, how do you know whether to say it is beau or belle?
Timothy est une personne très belle
Et
Timothy est un homme très beau…
In Spanish, it is ‘la avioneta’, feminine.
So you sold “el avion” to buy “la avioneta” 
Hahaha, but no Emir, even after your upgrade to bigger engines your DA42 would still be ‘una avioneta’ over here.
My Falco is definitely female.
Lovely to handle, very good looking and fast.
Perhaps more importantly, just when I think I’m beginning to understand her she throws me another curveball.
Pilot-H wrote:
Timothy est une personne très belleEt
Timothy est un homme très beau…
Eh bien…“je suis beau” ou “je suis belle”?
Same question, except that I am more obviously male than a car. (Ask my wife and the nanny.)
Any serious answers from someone even more French than Howard?
There are many French pilots on EuroGA…
I can’t speak a word of French but AFAIK, in languages that have genders for objects, like Czech has, there are no rules. You just have to learn the whole language to get it right. This is one reason I managed to learn English despite having a zero gift for languages.
This is a very funny thread
Peter wrote:
in languages that have genders for objects
That is the issue. French does not have absolute gender for objects, it can vary depending how the object is described…un taxi/une voiture, un homme/une personne…you can even say “il est une personne” which roughly translates to “he is a she” and as a reasonable fluent but non-native French speaker, I find the whole philosophy rather incomprehensible.
Timothy wrote:
you can even say “il est une personne” which roughly translates to “he is a she” and as a reasonable fluent but non-native French speaker, I find the whole philosophy rather incomprehensible.
There is no need to look for a deep and general explanation. Different grammatical genders can be combined in French the same way singular and plural can be combined in English: “…they are the single reason…” – it’s just a matter of likening two different entities in terms other than their gender/number.
Ok, so Jean-Pierre the local taxi driver buys a new vehicle and brings it back to the village. His friends gather round his beautiful new object of desire and some are saying “qu’il est beau, n’est-ce pas?” and others “n’est-elle pas belle?” How does that sound and what is going through their heads?
