I am happy for a certain number of corrections to be made concerning the agreement of the past participle, particularly with regard to these numerous exceptions that complicate our lives. Now, the question is to know how far this spelling reform should extend. Reading the points of view of certain reformers of written French, it seems that this correction is struggling to find its limits, so much do their proposals border on exaggeration and sometimes even ridicule.
This is why some people advocate removing double consonants from certain words to make written French less difficult. Precisely, the word difficile, which is so difficult to spell, would be amputated of one of its “f” to simplify our existence. Progress cannot be stopped, you might say. But you ain’t seen nothing yet!
How often does a person make a mistake when spelling the word “man”? In over twenty years of teaching middle school, I have never had to correct a student because he misspelled the word. Regardless, some radical reformers are taking the lead by proposing a solution to a problem that does not exist. Thus, they suggest removing the “h” from the word man and, of course, one of its “m”s as explained above. Good luck then to future readers who have been formatted by this reform if they ever think of looking it up in the library Land of Omes by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry…
Land of Omesthe radical reformers would specify. Given that the “s” is not pronounced orally and that the indefinite article “des” alone tells us that there are several “ome” on earth for Saint-Exupéry, then why bother with this cumbersome letter? The same would obviously apply to words such as choux, genous, hiboux which would lose their “x” in the plural, since they are inaudible orally.
Writing is not “the mirror of speech”
From these few examples that the reformers offer us, we can guess the presupposition that lies at the base of their enterprise: “The writing of a language is supposed to be the reflection of its speaking”, lexicologist and professor of linguistics Mireille Elchacar tells us about the way people express themselves orally.
When a person speaks orally, they do not do so in the manner of a book. Unspoken words, facial expressions, gestures, and context count for a lot in a face-to-face conversation. Thus, while syntax and vocabulary choice do not have to be as rigorous and precise as in writing, speakers still manage to make themselves understood most of the time.
The written text is of another nature. It must be self-sufficient, become independent of its creator once written down; hence these requirements of precision, clarity and coherence to be understood by the reader. Mastery of grammar, syntax and the acquisition of a very rich vocabulary obviously contribute to the quality of the text and, by the same token, to the expression of a more subtle thought, as proven by the great literary works that entertain us with psychological or social realities that go far beyond what “speaking” can do.
As I recalled in my “Duty of Education”, language is a natural faculty that only needs to be stimulated by a social environment to flourish. No parent explains the rules of grammar to their child when they start to speak. For its part, writing is a cultural phenomenon that must rely on a reconfiguration of different neural circuits in the potential reader to take shape and consolidate after many years of practice, effort and many frustrations; a difficult learning process, with two “f’s”, which is never finished.
For the most radical reformers, written French, by its complexity, is necessarily elitist and even goes so far as to create linguistic insecurity among the poor devils who try to master this fixed form of writing. Hence the urgency to remove the obstacles, to level down at the risk of finding oneself in the depths of thought. But what is the real elitism here, if not the fact of imagining that ordinary mortals are too foolish to learn to write well – on the condition, however, of doing so using methods that have proven themselves!
But let’s play along for a moment and agree to remove double consonants, plural markers, and the whole host of hassles surrounding past participle agreement. We’ll still end up with a high rate of college and university students who won’t be able to tell the difference between a past participle and an infinitive, who will continue to confuse “se” and “ce”, as well as “ces”, “ses” and “c’est”, and who still won’t know when to use the famous “dont” as well as the comma, etc.
To make their lives easier, should we once again pass the big grader? In fact, I believe that this refrain surrounding the agreement of the past participle represents the tree that hides the forest: while we quibble about it, we do not question the quality of the methods used in our schools to teach children to read and write.
Narrowing the field of thought
I wonder to what extent this unbridled desire to reform spelling is not part of this movement of deconstruction of most cultural references that has been sweeping over a large part of the West for several years. After the toppling of statues, the censorship of speakers, the banning of theatrical productions, the removal of certain works from libraries, the rewriting of certain titles or passages of books, the blacklisting of various words from the vocabulary, not to mention the excesses of inclusive and non-gendered writing, here are valiant souls now campaigning for a radical rectification of spelling and of written French in general.
Amputating the language of several of its elements in such an arbitrary manner would have the effect of depriving us of the etymological roots of several words and thus making this language even more obscure. Moreover, once this radical transformation has been carried out, the reader who would have been trained from this simplified “ortografe” would see all the literature produced before this great linguistic break as “old French” that is off-putting and incomprehensible.
This exercise hides, in my opinion, a form of unacknowledged nihilism about which George Orwell had nevertheless warned us in 1984. In this masterpiece, the leaders of Oceania want to gradually impose Newspeak in order to reduce the scope of the population’s thought and, by the same token, any possibility of protest. This totalitarian power intended to achieve its goal around 2050 by tampering with and simplifying the language while reducing, step by step, the number of words available for the expression of what, ultimately, would only have the appearance of thought.
In a world where, in our schools, comic strips have replaced great literature, where users of the X network are required to condense their “thoughts” into less than 280 characters, while others bombard each other with text messages composed of abbreviations, a more than anemic vocabulary and in contempt of all syntax, one can wonder if George Orwell’s dystopia will not come true sooner than expected if the wishes of these radical reformers end up coming to fruition.