[…] French distinguishes between a ‘masculine gender’ and a ‘feminine gender’. The formal behaviour of nouns belonging to a masculine gender is simpler. If all nouns behaved like them, there would, of course, be no gender problem, quite exactly no gender. We may therefore assume that the feminine gender is the key to gender […] First, it is essential to distinguish feminine gender from reference to female sex […] The situation is perfectly clear when, leaving aside the personal pronoun, we concentrate on the marks of the gender in the nominal group. When I say 'la grande montagne blanche', I choose to use the definite article and not the indefinite 'une'; I choose to qualify the mountain as great; I choose to speak of a mountain and not, for example, of a curtain; I choose to qualify it as white. But I never choose feminine instead of masculine. This not means that I refuse to characterize the mountain as a female: I certainly do. It means that I am not given a chance to choose a gender because as soon as I say, or forsee I am going to say, 'montagne', I cannot avoid giving the definite article and the accompanying adjectives the fuller, so-called ‘feminine’, form. My chose of 'montagne' implies a number of formal accidents which tradition labels as feminine form. In Saussurian terms, we may say that the 'signifiant' of the feminine noun 'montagne' is not limited to that form, but that is discontinuous and emerges at the others points of the utterance. In our particular instance, it shows as the /…a/ of 'la', the /…d/ of 'grande', the /ʃ/ of 'blanche'. Gender is quite frequently lumped together with number as two frequent nominal categories. But this should not induce us to put them on the same level of analysis.
- Martinet (1962), Pag. 15-17