# FR: Sa Sainteté (le pape) - pronom il / elle ?



## Nunty

The following sentence, from the program of Pope Paul VI's visit to the Holy Land in 1964, shocked me.

*Sa Sainteté se rendra à la Délégation Apostolique où Elle arrivera vers 10 h. 30.

*_Sa Sainteté _is a title of the Pope, "His Holiness". The pronoun in the second part of the sentence is taking the gender of "holiness" not of the person whose "holiness" it is, even though _Sa Sainteté _can only be the pope:

The text is almost certainly grammatically correct, as it is from an official program, but the logic escapes me. Can we really use a feminine pronoun to refer to a male in this way?

If the sentence were _Sa Sainteté le Pape se rendra... _would the pronoun become _Il_ or would it still be _Elle_?

Thank you.


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## Oddmania

That's right, elle refers to _Sa Sainteté_ so it's correct.

If you said _Sa Sainteté le Papa_, then maybe both would be correct. I'd tend to use _Il_.


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## CapnPrep

Nunty said:


> The text is almost certainly grammatically correct, as it is from an official program, but the logic escapes me. Can we really use a feminine pronoun to refer to a male in this way?


Both _il _and _elle_ can be considered "logical" choices in French: either choice is justifiable in some ways, but unsatisfactory in other ways. But yes, _elle_ can sometimes refer to a male (and _il_ to a woman) if they have previously been referred to using a noun with the "wrong" grammatical gender. In this particular example, I believe that _elle_ is recommended, although some speakers might more naturally say _il_, and I don't think this would be incorrect.



> If the sentence were _Sa Sainteté le Pape se rendra... _would the pronoun become _Il_ or would it still be _Elle_?


In this case there would be more of a tendency to use _Il_, but _Elle_ would still be correct.

I'm sure that some grammarians have strong feelings about this and would declare that one of the pronouns is totally wrong in each case. But in fact this would just be their personal preference.


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## Maître Capello

I fully agree with CapnPrep.

By the way, note that there are many cases in French where it is quite natural to use _elle_ when talking about a male, e.g., when he is referred to as _une personne_…


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## Nunty

Many thanks to everyone. I'm familiar with the possible "anomalies" (I know they are only anomalies in my head) with _personne_, for example. I guess _Sa Sainteté _struck me as bizarre because the term can only refer to one person and that person is always a man.

Thanks again.


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## Francobritannocolombien

Another example: Votre/Son Altesse, Votre/Sa Majesté, to address (or to refer to) a prince or a king, as in this fable by La Fontaine (_Le loup et l'agneau_) in which the lamb says this to the wolf (who is a male, or else it would be _une louve_, and besides the lamb would not also address him as "Sire")
"(...)- Sire, répond l'Agneau, que votre Majesté
Ne se mette pas en colère ;
Mais plutôt qu'*elle *considère
Que je me vas désaltérant
Dans le courant,
Plus de vingt pas au-dessous d'*Elle*, (...)"


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## Montaigne

Sainteté is feminine in gender and requires "sa" whereas holiness is masculine 
and "his" is the possessive.
Majesté  is feminine so it goes "Sa majesté".
Altesse is feminine too but for the sake of euphony "Son" is used.


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## Francobritannocolombien

Montaigne said:


> Sainteté is feminine in gender and requires "sa" whereas holiness is masculine and "his" is the possessive. (...)



I think I understand what you are saying, although I would probably not have put it that way. "Holiness," as any other English noun, is neither masculine nor feminine, but that does not matter because what counts in English is the gender of the possessor, not of the thing possessed, so you say _His _Majesty for a king, _Her _Majesty for a queen, _His _Holiness for a pope (no choice!). In French, what matters is the gender of the noun possessed (if you consider that _majesty _is a thing that a person possesses), so it is always "Sa" Majesté and "Sa" Sainteté because those nouns are feminine, and as you very well indicate, the "son" in "Son Excellence" is there only because of Excellence starting with a vowel, but it is also a feminine noun.


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## Montaigne

Franco...
I agree that many a noun in English is neutral, but not any.
What about "woman" and "man"?


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## Nunty

I don't want to get off the track too much, but English does not have grammatical gender. There are no male and female adjectives, for example. A woman is "she" because she is female; a man is "he" because he is male.

Unlike French, in English the choice of pronoun has to do with the sex of the person involved. That is different from grammatical gender and that is why I was startled by the text in the first post.


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## Keith Bradford

In fact there are four genders in English, and as Nunty says in #10 they all depend on the sex of the person or thing involved. Thus:

*Masculine*: The Pope... his car when he visited England
*Feminine*: The Queen... her corgis when she goes to Balmoral
*Neutral*: My car... its noise when it breaks down
*Common*: Your unknown friend... their letter which they have sent you (this is disputable)
There is no point in trying to analyse French in these terms, because it's the word that has a gender in French, depending entirely on etymology, usually Latin.  _Sa Sainteté_ has to be converted straight into option one above because he is masculine […].  

The difficulty, as Nunty says in #5, is remembering.  I once had a very red face when interpreting: "_Maintenant je présente une personne que vous connaissez bien.  Elle était rédactrice en chef du journal X et ensuite elle a été mutée vers.._." and so on.  I'd said "she" about six times before the curly-headed _personne_ raised *his* head.


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## CapnPrep

Montaigne said:


> What about "woman" and "man"?


The only thing that English cares about is the fact that women are female and men are male. The word _woman_ is not feminine, and the word _man_ is not masculine. As FBC and Nunty have said, modern English has no grammatical genders. (What KB refers to is _natural_ gender.)



Montaigne said:


> whereas holiness is masculine


No, _holiness_ is not masculine. (In fact, in Old English, it was a feminine noun.) Moreover, as an abstract concept, "holiness" is neither male nor female, so we have to use the pronoun _it_:Holiness is difficult to achieve, but *it*/*he/*she is even harder to maintain.
His holiness / her holiness / your holiness is without limits, so we plan to put *it*/*him/*her/*you in bottles and sell *it*/*him/*her/*you on the Internet.​But in this particular case, _His Holiness_ refers to a male. So we have to use _he_:His Holiness is coming for dinner and *he*/*she/*it only eats gummi bears.​So in English, we only care about what the word _mean_s. This already leads to some problems, which KB briefly alluded to and which are discussed in many other threads. In French, you sometimes care about what the word means, but you also care about the word itself, and this leads to even more problems. (Don't worry, Nunty: the anomalies are not just in your head. They're built into the language, so they're in everyone's heads. But if you could see into everyone's heads, I think grammatical anomalies would be the least of your worries…  )


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## pyan

Please remember that this thread is about French grammar. There has been some discussion of English grammar but any further posts which are not about French grammar will be removed as off-topic.

Pyan
as moderator


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## Maître Capello

*Moderator note:* The more general discussion about _une personne_, etc. has been moved to this thread.


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