I love short, descriptive words like naïf. I recently saw it used, calling Yushchenko "no naïf," which surely is the case.
However, I have a question about naïf. When I look it up, it seems to be the same word as naïve. When you look up naïf, the dictionary cites naïve, and then says "also naïf."
While I would use naïf as a noun, I wouldn't use naïve as one. Would you?
Naïf is a French adjective. As such, it takes the gender of the noun it is describing. The masculine version is naïf, the feminine naïve.
The feminine version is borrowed by English more often than the masculine, and most people use it regardless of gender; some, however, out of pedantry or for some other reason, will use naïf with a masculine noun. You might therefore describe a woman as naïve, but a man as naïf.
Something similar happens with blond/blonde; I am sure there are other examples.
Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day. Set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Arnie is absolutely correct abut the gender and adjectivity of naïf. In most Romance languages (and others besides), it's easy to turn an adjective into a noun without any derivational morphology being involved (i.e., no suffixes, so the form of the word does not change). Though English does this all the time with nouns into verbs and verbs into nouns, it sounds a little akward with adjectives into nouns, though you can add one as in the red one.
Originally posted by Kalleh: So, naïf is no more a noun than naïve is, correct? Interesting. I had always thought naïve the adjective and naïf the noun.
Naive is certainly an adjective in English: you can't say 'she is a naive'. I tend to agree with Kalleh that naif is mainly a noun, though it's not in regular enough use to be sure. I would also be inclined to treat it as ungendered, and say 'she is a faux-naif'.
There's no requiremement in English to retain gender distinctions when we borrow words. 'Blond(e)' is complicated by the fact that 'blond' is an older borrowing from French, and 'blonde' a reimport; but in any case I don't think they're consistently used along just gender lines. Another problem is Filipin-o/a, which is naturalized enough that it should have a single English form: I would use Filipino regardless.
I can only concur. My dictionary comments that 'naif' is a very rarely used adjective (and my dictionary is old so you must be very out of date Kalleh ) dating from 1598 and then immediately refers me to 'naive'. It seems that both words mean exactly the same and are distinguished only by gender. As we don't tend to gender words in English as other languages do it has become redundant. Clearly anticipating 'women's lib' the masculine version has been pushed aside.
A bit of Googling confirms Kalleh's and my original impression, that 'naif' is a genderless noun in modern English. "A naif" gets 5000 hits, virtually all for the noun sense, very few adjectival (a naif painter, voice, narrator, question). And many of them have female referents: Kristin Davis, Brooke Shields, "a naif always believes that she", Catherine Morland, and Tom Wolfe's description of his 18-year-old girl main character, etc.
To test if 'naive' could be a noun I searched for "a naive in". Of the about 120 hits for this, much less than half -- probably less than a quarter -- are as nouns; whereas for the 230-odd for "a naif in", almost all are the noun.
Same here: naif is not a word in my active vocabulary. Before looking into this I only thought of it in the word faux-naif (which the Google test shows to be about 8:1 an adjective over a noun).
