Corona Daily 447: Is Covid a He or She?

If you were to cross the scenic Pont des Arts from the Louvre in Paris, you will reach the magnificent Académie Française on the other side of the Seine. A heritage building founded in 1635, it is the custodian of the purity and authenticity of the French language. A maximum of forty invited and elected members, (expensively dressed and entitled to carry swords) issue rules and guidelines for French speakers. Though they are not, they are called the immortals - a reference to the language they guard.

Mostly comprising elderly gentlemen and occasionally a lady (732 immortal men and nine women, until now), they have carefully protected the French language. The group includes novelists, poets, literary critics, philosophers, historians and the odd foreigner who commands mastery over the French language.

Since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, les immortelles have been upset and disturbed because they see and sometimes hear la covid, other times le covid. Of course it is not possible for Covid-19 to be both masculine and feminine, pushing these expert French linguists to heatedly debate its gender, on video, of course. With 25,000 French citizens already dead of Covid-19, they finally issued their verdict on 7 May.

Covid is feminine.

Like primary school teachers, they offered a detailed philological explanation. An acronym or abbreviation must first be unfolded to see its full form. Then the gender of the key word looked at and applied to the acronym. That is why FBI is masculine, but CIA is feminine. Because bureau is masculine, whereas agency (agence) is feminine. Disease (maladie) is a female in French, therefore Covid becomes a female as well.

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What the legendary Académie Française pronounces is not binding on the public. These old masters try to stop the invasion of English language into France. They recommended mobile multifonction when smartphones appeared. And tried to replace the catchy le wifi with l’access sans fil a internet. If you use that phrase no Parisian will understand what you are saying.

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In Indian languages, both ‘virus’ and ‘disease’ are masculine. (And everybody knew it without an academy). Italian, Spanish and Portuguese languages declared Covid-19 to be feminine in March itself. Russian and Polish also have genders for nouns. It is important to know the gender before you can translate novel coronavirus. In Polish, a novel boy would be nowy, a novel girl nowa, and a novel child, nowe. Just to clarify: Covid-19 is called a coronavirus infection in Russian, and is feminine, because infection is feminine. In Polish, Covid is feminine because disease (choroba) is feminine. Virus is masculine in both.

In short, in European languages a nasty male results in a dangerous female.

Ravi