Media and news

The list that carries a reader from understanding sentences to understanding a news item. One of its words came straight out of English and picked up something on the way that it could not have had at home. L’interview is *feminine: this page’s own example reads l’interview a été enregistrée hier, with the e* on the participle, and there is no way to guess that from the English word, which has no gender at all. A borrowing has to be given one at the border, and French handed this one the gender of the word it displaced, une entrevue. The person doing the asking did not follow: un interviewer and un intervieweur are masculine, so the conversation and the journalist take different articles. Worth knowing because gender on a borrowed noun is invisible until an adjective or a participle has to agree with it, and then it is the only thing anybody notices.