Monday, 12 March 2012

Song thrush or Grive musicienne

It is funny to see the slight difference in meaning between both French and English words. "Musicienne", which is the feminine of "musicien", means "musician". Whereas in English, we describe our thrushes as "whistling".
Talking about differences, the difference in gender is somewhat complicated in French. It is something you just have to learn at school. If it makes you feel better, we, French people, had to learn all your irregular verbs too (i.e. to go, I went, not I goed, etc.)!!
Now, we say " grive musicienne" because we say "une grive", not "un grive", the word is feminine. Yep, even if the bird is male, we still call it a "she". In the French language, the "le" ou "la" is associated with the name, not the actual gender. Similarly, your calling a ship "she" was always a bit weird to me, probably because we say "un bateau/ un navire", masculine. I believe it is because sailors were very fond of their boats that they referred to them as female.
One funny analogy about gender (they are lots more) is frogs and toads, i.e. grenouille and crapeau. Grenouille is feminine, so we would say "Madame Grenouille" and crapeau is masculine so we would say "Monsieur Crapeau", irrespective of the fact the Grenouille could be a male and Crapeau a female.
Anyway, enough of my French lesson. Have a look at my Youtube video of the thrush eating a big slug http://youtu.be/PavZxtvCY_U



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