It is not new that participle agreements have been considered a recurring difficulty in French spelling. Already in 1900, the Leygues decree, the first proposed legislation on spelling in France, requested tolerance for the agreement of the past participle in certain cases. More recently, in 2022, a study that I conducted with my colleague Amélie-Hélène Rheault places them in second place among spelling mistakes made by Quebec university students.
In the wake of the project launched to reform French teaching, the Minister of Education wants to gather the opinions of specialists on spelling corrections (RO). However, ROs are not new: they were proposed in 1990 and are now systematically taught in France and Switzerland. We are no longer at the stage of studying ROs, but at the stage of adopting them. However, the Minister could look into a more current proposal: the one concerning the agreements — misunderstood and unloved — of the past participle.
Test your knowledge. What ending do you add to the following past participles?
They ate… fruit.
The fruits they ate…
They ate some…
They withdrew…
They cut each other…
They cut their hair.
[Réponses : mangé, mangés, mangé, désistés, coupées, coupé]
If you got everything right without consulting a reference book: hats off! The common man, for his part, even if he has studied for a long time, has probably asked himself a few questions before attempting an answer, not necessarily the right one. These rules, and especially their numerous exceptions, are spread over no less than 14 pages in The correct use de Grevisse: with the auxiliary “avoir” or “être”, with an essentially or occasionally pronominal verb, with “en” or the direct object “l’”, followed by an infinitive, alouette!
What seems normal for French speakers, namely spending a lot of time questioning the written code, checking spelling rules and rereading to find a forgotten “s”, is in fact not entirely so. The writing of a language is supposed to be a reflection of its speaking. And as all languages evolve (otherwise they would disappear), all writing evolves too. All of them? Yes, except that of French.
This is how the “s” and “e” refer to the general rules for pluralizing and feminine forms from several centuries ago. If we forget them so often in writing, it is because the language has evolved since then, and these written markers no longer reflect how the language works. In speech, these markers are not heard. However, there is no confusion: if I say “les femmes”, my interlocutor does not hear the “s” in femmes, but he hears the determiner “les”, which is in the plural. It is this (as a general rule) which bears the mark of the plural of nouns in French, for several centuries. The same goes for the feminine: the word “ami” alone will not indicate the gender, information which will be given, once again, by the determiner (un/une).
So the rules of the past participle correspond to an old pronunciation of French? Not quite.
They come from… 16th century Italiane century. As Mario Désilets reminds us, it was the poet Clément Marot who introduced them into French. We thus based ourselves on another language to write French. In Italian, we pronounced all the letters, including the endings bearing the gender and number markers. In French, we no longer pronounced them when we adopted these rules.
From the moment they were introduced, these rules caused a stir. Voltaire is credited with saying: “Clément Marot brought back two things from Italy, the pox and the agreement of the past participle. I think it is the second that is causing the most damage!”
Italian has since dropped these rules: the language has changed since the 16th century.e century, and its writing followed, as all writing is supposed to do. It would be absurd for French speakers to fight to preserve them.
The EROFA group (Studies for a rationalization of today’s French spelling) has taken on the problem. The work of its researchers aims to identify regularities in French spelling in order to propose changes that limit exceptions. Their reform reduces the rules for agreement of the past participle to two: with the auxiliary “avoir”, the past participle is invariable, and in all other cases, it agrees with the word to which it refers.
Unlike the RO, which some specialists considered too timid, the enthusiasm surrounding the reform of past participle agreements is almost unanimous among linguists. Since 2014, several associations have supported it, including the International Council of the French Language, the Belgian Association of French Teachers, the Quebec Association of French Teachers and the French Association for the Teaching of French.
Between this support and the implementation of the new rules stands political will. That of the ministry, yes, but that of the Office québécois de la langue française (OQLF) as well: the ministry says it will wait for the opinion of the OQLF, but the latter is not getting involved and is slow to formulate an opinion on the matter.
Some say that the education system spends 80 hours teaching past participle agreements. I would add: with mediocre results. We quickly forget the exceptions, or even the main rules. I have to teach them again at university. Not because my dear students are bad, but because these rules defy all logic.
To the group that is considering the reform of French teaching in Quebec: I propose that we adopt the reform, and that we use the hours thus recovered to teach the history of our language and its spelling.