Apparent gender confusion in French “native-speakers”

It is slightly strange that this should surprise anyone, since Romance languages are notorious for their variation in the attribution of gender to nouns (Latin neuter -> almost universally Romance masculine, but you then get swaps, and doubling ups, and all kinds of mayhem in the various modern languages/dialects). One wonders whether the regional background of all these “native-speakers” was considered, whatever the French state’s famous lack of interest in such variation.

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Comments

1. Aidan Kehoe sez:
   25 February 2008 at 2:41 PM

   I wonder how different the results had been if the questions had been constructed as fill-in-the-correct-adjective-gender-form in context.

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