The author is a professor of literature in Montreal, editor-in-chief of the journal Argument and essayist. He notably published These words that think for us (Liber, 2017) and Why do our children leave school ignorant? (Boreal, 2008).
The Quebec Association of French Teachers (AQPF), and its vice-president, Alexandra Pharand, have just presented to the Minister of Education, Bernard Drainville, a project to reform the rule of agreement of past participles in order to remove, they say, “the exceptions”. This project is part of the solutions they propose “for the improvement of written French”.
The reasons alleged to justify this reform are always the same as soon as we attack language or spelling: on the one hand, they are both old-fashioned and outdated. They should definitely be changed. “Just as in a language, there are words that appear according to usage, there are words that disappear because it does not correspond to the reality of the speakers”, says Alexandra Pharand in an interview. granted to the newspaper 24 hoursin which she adds that “certain rules of past participles come straight from the XVe century”, which seems to him sufficient to constitute in itself a heresy or an absurdity.
On the other hand, these rules would be too complicated: she thus estimates “at 80 hours the time needed to teach Quebec students the rules of past participle agreement”, before concluding: “It’s so much time that could be reinvested in better ways. »
I don’t teach secondary school myself, but this figure of 80 hours frankly leaves me speechless. A priori, if the pupils know how to spot the direct complement in a sentence as well as the complement pronouns which are found syntactically most frequently before the verb, teaching this rule requires at most 15 minutes; more, if we include pronominal verbs, but certainly not 80 hours!
This figure, which came out of nowhere, seems to me to be a pure rhetorical exaggeration intended to convince a sympathetic public, who will readily imagine poor children hunched over for hours on their desks toiling away like coupons to memorize and apply abstruse, archaic rules that do not does not correspond to their “reality”. Let’s hope that the same logic will not be applied to the rules of mathematics and physics, some of which are not so simple, however, and some of which – horresco references ! — go back to Archimedes or Pascal…
But let us be reassured, there is only the French language which is usually targeted by this trial in archaism and complication. I have never read that the English teachers proposed to reduce the list of irregular verbs or to make the lexical spelling of Shakespeare’s language more phonetic, or that the mathematics teachers wanted to simplify trigonometry! Surprisingly, it is only French that we believe we have the right to transform, simplify, abuse. The efforts required to learn it are always too much. On this account, it would also be necessary to remove the relative pronoun “dont” which students have notoriously difficulty using correctly, to standardize conjugations, to abolish the subjunctive, etc.
Clarity and precision
This does not mean, however, that we should oppose all spelling reform. Not more than the language, the spelling is of course not fixed once and for all. To believe so would be just as absurd as to consider that one can upset it because one considers it too complicated. But if we want to reform spelling, we must proceed with caution, consult grammarians and linguists, language historians in particular; you also have to have good reasons for doing it and not just put forward the simplistic argument that it no longer corresponds to the “reality” of young people.
In this regard, one of the examples given by Mr.me Pharand is enlightening. She thinks she is defending her cause by pointing out that, in the following sentence: “The death of the man I have so longed for.” », it is difficult to identify the direct complement placed before the verb and therefore to know how to agree the past participle. Should it be reconciled with “the man”, “whom I have so desired”, or with “his death”, “which I have so desired”? This example precisely reveals that, far from being useless, this agreement of the past participle with the direct complement of the verb makes it possible to remove the potential ambiguity of this statement.
This is undoubtedly one of the reasons why this rule of agreement with having has been maintained since the 16th century.e century. It would also be an answer she could give to students who, according to an article by The Press+, do not understand “why we grant it like that”. She could add that this complexity of French spelling is neither fanciful nor insane, but that it is motivated by an ideal of clarity and precision of the written language which should be cultivated.
Let’s dream a little: she might even go so far as to tell them that the grammarians of old were neither imbeciles nor infamous dictators imposing completely arbitrary rules on users of the language, but people who were mostly honest and often scholars who, like ourselves, were trying to make French spelling more logical and consistent; of a course on grammatical spelling, she would thus teach a lesson in respect for these human beings of the past.