Remove an “f” from difficulties, remove an “h” and an “m” from men, and you will obtain… a simplified French spelling, accessible to as many people as possible.
In any case, these are the conclusions of the EROFA research group (Studies for the rationalization of French spelling today), which presented its results on Thursday at Acfas. As part of our work, we are studying the deletion of double consonants, as in “charrette” (while we also write “carriage”), that of the plural ending of words in “x” (knee, louse, etc. .), the disappearance of Greek letters (like the “h” of men), but also, and perhaps above all, the thorny reform of the agreements of past participles.
Errors in the agreement of past participles come second in the list of spelling errors made by university students, according to a study carried out by Mireille Elchacar, of TELUQ University, and Amélie-Hélène Rheault, of the University of Sherbrooke. One of the suggestions put forward to make this grammatical rule simpler, is to remove all agreements with the verb avoir. This would suddenly reduce the “14 pages” devoted to the use of past participles in grammars used in class, notes Mme Elchacar. Furthermore, the most common errors noted in this study are those of plural agreement, which requires adding a silent “s” to the end of the word.
This use of the silent “s” is a relic of a French language that has not been adequately reformed for centuries, explains Mireille Elchacar in an interview. “Hundreds of years ago, the plural ‘s’ in French was pronounced,” she says. This is still the case in English, renowned for being a more accessible language than French.
Today, Mireille Elchacar would like us to replace the 80 hours spent in school teaching the complex rules of the past participle with 80 hours spent instead studying the history of the language.
An elitist written language
For her, the written French language, due to its complexity, is elitist. Its complexities enchant the initiated, who find, in the mastery of spelling, a certain confirmation of their social status. Others only see pitfalls, often considered superfluous, particularly among those in favor of in-depth reform.
While other languages have updated their spelling to closely match the oral language, written French has remained abnormally frozen in time, continues Mireille Elchacar.
“Spelling is supposed to constantly adapt to speaking. All languages in the world constantly update their spelling, except French. It is a problem. Because the spoken word is moving further and further away from the written word, and that also gives us the impression that spelling is not supposed to change, which is not the case. »
In the presentation of EROFA’s research work, Annie Desnoyers, from the University of Montreal, and Danièle Cogis, from the University of Paris Ouest, demonstrate how languages like Spanish and Italian have remained as close as possible of oral language. Thus, an “analysis”, whose name in French has retained the Greek letter “y”, is written “analisis” in Spanish, “analisi” in Italian, and “análise” in Portuguese. All these languages have also removed the “h” contained in the French word “arithmetic”, for example.
In the spelling reform proposed in 1990, the way had already been paved for the removal of accents from certain words, certain double consonants, hyphens, and the plural of compound words. But this reform did not go far enough, according to experts, and it was also ineffective.
“It’s very targeted on a few words,” continues Mireille Elchacar. The proposed changes are very imperfect, they are very incomplete and they have many exceptions. »
The aesthetics of language
Although minimal, the changes proposed in 1990 still caused an outcry. The host Bernard Pivot, who recently died, had accepted the entire reform with the exception of the removal of the circumflex accent.
“If you start removing circumflexes, colons, acute accents, etc., you will completely change the aesthetic of the language. The grammarians who had proposed this were not at all sensitive to this aspect,” he told the Literary magazine in 2019.
Also present at the conference, researcher Cléo Mathieu, lecturer at McGill University, presented the results of a survey conducted around the question of reforming the use of past participles. Oddly, the 16- to 19-year-olds she interviewed showed just as much resistance to grammar changes as older adults over 55.
“It’s less surprising that older people are reluctant to change their habits. But it surprised me from the witnesses aged 16 to 19. I thought that since they were still struggling with the difficulties of past participle agreement, they would want to reform it. But in reality, we found ourselves with higher rates of resistance. Some statements indicated that they were afraid of losing what they had acquired,” she says. Generally speaking, 39.2% of respondents to his survey tended to disagree with a reform of past participles, and 41.7% were mostly in agreement: close results. Generally speaking, his sample included people who were more educated than average.
Social costs
For Mireille Elchacar, the difficulties of the written French language generate enormous underestimated social costs. It is of course the less educated people, often at the bottom of the social ladder, who are more penalized by the difficulties of the written French language.
“We end up with a system which, unfortunately, causes a lot of social problems,” she said. You can go to school for a very long time and still make a lot of mistakes. It can cause discouragement, linguistic insecurity, or even dropping out of school. This is not a trivial problem. There are also new arrivals. Frenchifying newcomers is very complicated. There are many students who hope to make a living by going to college. And they seem stuck because they can’t pass the placement tests to get into college. »