The pandemic may have a broad back, but it cannot explain everything. Already, on March 6, 2008, The Press published a text by journalist Denis Lessard entitled “The results in dictation sting of the nose”, where he affirmed that “if the success rate of students was based on knowledge of spelling, it would be a disaster in the secondary schools of the Quebec”.
And on November 5, 2009, Daphnée Dion-Viens, journalist at Sun, wrote that according to half of the teachers, “the students do not know how to write”. And then on December 6, 2022, the evaluation department of the French Ministry of National Education published a study revealing that in the same dictation of 67 words given at intervals to primary school pupils between 1987 and 2021, the number fouls had increased, on average, from 10.7 to 19.4 fouls, almost double. In their report, the researchers thought fit to add that “French spelling is one of the most complex in the world and requires long and tedious learning”.
Are we going to end up understanding that we can throw the blame on all the speakers and all the circumstances we want, the fault lies above all in the very nature of what we want the students to learn, then that the “long and cumbersome” conditions for doing so simply no longer exist.
The mastery of our spelling (which should not be the most important and problematic component of learning to write) could reasonably be acquired under current conditions, but on condition that it undergo a serious cure thinness, as many other languages have successfully done, including those sister languages of French that are Italian, Spanish and Portuguese.
As François de Closets said so well in his book Zero faults (Editions Mille et une nuit, 2009), “the great mutation of our language is taking place before our eyes in general incomprehension. New technologies, which make writing the privileged means of the 21ste century, condemn the traditional status of our spelling in our culture”.
What is needed is therefore an in-depth spelling reform, and not just a reform like that of 1990, which has never been imposed and which ended up confusing everyone.
But the mere idea of such a reform inevitably receives fierce opposition (hence these piecemeal “rectifications”). A good example of the sacredness of spelling for French speakers is the outcry over the proposal to write, in “the new spelling”, “nénufar” instead of “nénuphar” in order to correct a simple etymological error. Now not only do Italian, Spanish and Portuguese write “nenufar”, they also write, without worrying about etymology, “ortografia, filosofia, farmacia, ritmo (rhythm)”. This priority given to “transparency” (the correspondence between the spelling and the pronunciation of words) in the overhaul of their spelling has resulted in students making far fewer mistakes than young Francophones, which allows them to pass to more meaningful, more productive things in the acquisition of writing.
It is absolutely not necessary, to ensure the clarity of communication, to know how to choose, to transcribe the only sound “o” in French, among the spellings “o, os, ot, ôt, op, oc, au, aux , water, waters, high, ault, eault”. And the same goes for this army of grammatical suffixes, most of which do not exist in spoken language, and which serve, for example, to make or not make the agreement of the past participle in a sentence like “the things that I have believed(?) to have to learn appeared to me(?) unjustified(?)”. And if we don’t make these chords here, does the clarity suffer?
Those who oppose a simplification of spelling often evoke the attack on its beauty and its richness, the leveling down, the sacrifice of an excellent instrument of intellectual formation. But we must not confuse the tool and what can be done with it. Musical notation, this “spelling” of music, is an infinitely simpler, more transparent, more user-friendly tool than French spelling, and yet it can be used to produce the greatest masterpieces. Nor should we confuse a race to the bottom with the democratization of education. Making everyone able to write French without this logorrhea of mistakes that we find in social media would be a great leveling up.
And as for intellectual training, it is in the conception, organization and transcription of ideas into well-constructed sentences using a rich and precise vocabulary that we find it, not in the tedious learning of a spelling stuffed with traps and useless rules.
Paul Valéry, this great poet, said: “I will not talk about our spelling, unfortunately fixed in all ignorance by the pedants of the XVIIe century, and which has since left the foreigner in despair and vitiated the pronunciation of a number of words. »