@Hexalyse @candle They don't loose their gender, if you put an adjective after "abeilles", the gender is reflected on it.

@Feufochmar @candle Yeah, another French fuckery : gendered adjectives. Why can't we have invariable adjectives ? Never understood the added value of this. If the subject is gendered/plural/singular, it's enough, don't need to complicate the adjectives you apply to it.

@Hexalyse @candle The gendered adjective is present in all latin languages, not just french (and they follow the same rules). Also, some adjectives are invariable in gender in french (ex. "jaune").
The gender can sometimes tell you to which nouns the adjective qualify. For instance "les chemins et les routes sinueux" and "les chemins et les routes sinueuses" are both correct, but do not have the same meaning. Because of the gender rules, in the first case, the adjective "sinueux" applies to both nouns "chemin" and "route" while in the second case, the adjective only applies to the second noun.

@Feufochmar @candle Do you know that not long ago, the rule was to use the gender of the last used nouns for the following adjective, instead of the "masculine wins" rule that we apply nowadays ? Languages change and evolve. But I still think having gendered nouns is kind of weird and arbitraty and makes things unnecessarilly more complex.

@Hexalyse @candle The rule "last word decide" still applies in some cases. The rules on the adjective are a bit complex when several nouns or several adjectives are present and often depends on the context.

The grammatical gender of a noun is always decided on abitrary rules, even in languages that have a gender distinction different from maculine/feminine, and is used as a way to partially disambiguate the language (as natural languages tend to be full of ambiguities). However, a language without grammatical gender is not automatically less sexist as the masculine/feminine difference may be provided in other ways.