Protégés and Protégées · 2:24pm Jul 21st, 2014
Like most European languages, English has a fair number of French loanwords. These can add a certain je ne sais quoi to your story; however, not all writers have the savoir-faire that is the mark of a true artiste. French has a lot of twiddly bits – accents, apostrophes, cédilles – that often confuse English speakers. In some cases, English as a language just says "meh, fuck it" eventually: for example, in older English books you can still find régime with an accent, but now it's simply regime. Ditto for rôle, which became role. However, not all French loanwords have been so bastardised, and in stories I edit I tirelessly work to make sure every tiny shard of Gallic is correct.
I just realised there's one thing I've been missing, though. It concerns the word protégé ("one who is protected"; past participle of protéger "to protect").
As you may know, French words can take on different forms depending on gender. The general rule is that female forms get an extra E at the end: thus, an engaged man is a fiancé, but an engaged woman is a fiancée. (Let's not go into irregular cases like beau / belle or vieux / vieille). Now, of course this also applies to the word protégé. When the one being protected is female, she's a protégée.
In a pony context, approximately 99.99% of instances of protégé refer to Twilight Sparkle as the personal student of Princess Celestia. Since Twilight Sparkle is most decidedly female (unless it's one of those stupid r63 fics), protégée is correct here and protégé isn't.
That will be all.
Love and tolerance,
Rambler
As an English grammar-freak, I must say that this truly opened my eyes to the oddities in another language. I will probably forget this lesson though, so for that I'm sorry.
Funny enough that I should see this blog post while we have a French foreign exchange dude over for most of the Summer.