I am not a past participle fetishist. I am deeply attached to French and I don’t like it being pushed around for trifles, but I am ready to discuss its reform if the reasons given for doing so are good.
Saying, for example, that French should be simplified because it is unnecessarily complex does not seem to me to be a valid reason. Many things in life are difficult and valuable. It would be easier to play tennis with big foam balls on a smaller court, but the sport would lose beauty and depth.
However, this analogy has its limits. Not knowing how to play tennis is not a tragedy. Not knowing how to write, in our developed societies, is one of them. There is a democratic issue here. The person who does not write for fear of not living up to the linguistic or social norm sees his civic value diminished.
Consequently, if certain elements of the language prove to be insurmountable obstacles for a majority of citizens in their handling of the tool, it must be discussed. Let’s do it with caution, however, because we don’t carelessly cut into an inherited treasure.
In Quebec, the debate on the reform of the past participle agreement was recently revived by the Quebec Association of French Teachers (AQPF). The latter proposes to retain only three rules: the past participles used alone agree like an adjective with the noun or the pronoun, the past participles with the auxiliary be or those of the pronominal verbs agree with the subject and the participles passed with the auxiliary avoir are invariable.
The first two rules retained already come under the norm and are therefore not subject to debate, with the exception of the modification, tempting but questionable, concerning the past participles of pronominal verbs. It is the third which sets fire to the powder.
The vice-president of the AQPF did not help her cause by defending it badly. The rule is old, she said, so it is no longer relevant. Such disregard for the past is unworthy of a teachers’ association and has no argumentative value. Many old things, indeed, are precious.
The rule is so complicated, added the AQPF spokesperson, that it requires many hours of teaching, which could be used for more useful learning. Although less insignificant than the first, this second argument is nonetheless weak. Learning French, in a French class, is never wasted time and looking into the subtleties of past participle agreement with avoir is full of educational potential.
The idea, finally, that it would be preferable to concentrate on the “regularities of the French language” rather than on the exceptions is defensible, but nothing, in the current state of things, prohibits doing so.
Such a disappointing argument proves teacher Gabriel Laverdière right. “Some teachers approach the rule by emphasizing its supposed difficulty or by delegitimizing its use, which consolidates the defeatism of students, when it would be necessary to arouse their curiosity”, he wrote in a letter to the Duty of April 19, 2023.
The critics of the reform are wrong, moreover, to cry about a race to the bottom and to believe that Quebec is standing apart in this affair. The reform supported by the AQPF was concocted by learned linguists, finds credible supporters throughout the French-speaking world and can claim a long tradition, which also illustrates the stupidity of discrediting a rule based on his seniority. In 1900, for example, the Superior Council of Public Instruction in France was already pleading for the invariability of the past participle constructed with the auxiliary avoir.
This question “is by far the best described, the most discussed area of the French language”, writes the linguist Bernard Cerquiglini in A participle that does not pass (Points, 2021), a small essay of prodigious erudition which brilliantly takes stock of this issue.
After telling the incredible story of the agreement of the past participle, Cerquiglini decides on the proposed reform. The current rule that the past participle used with the auxiliary avoir agrees with its direct object complement when the latter is preposed (placed before) must remain because it avoids ambiguities. Writing “the death of this man whom I have so longed for” does not mean the same thing as writing “the death of this man whom I have so longed for”. In all the other cases, often far-fetched, where the auxiliary avoir is involved, Cerquiglini pleads for obligatory invariability.
Its proposal seems to me wiser and better defended than that of the AQPF.
Columnist (Presence Info, Game), essayist and poet, Louis Cornellier teaches literature in college.