Recently on my social networks, my algorithm regularly appeared this extract from Beautiful discomforts. I choose to see it as a calling. Martin Matte’s daughter does her homework and finds French well complicated.
Her: “Faith” does that take an “e”?
Him: It depends, is it the liver or the faith?
Her: Faith. Well yes, if it’s feminine it takes an “e”.
Him: No. If it’s faith, it doesn’t take an “e”.
Her: When does it take an “e” first?
Him: When it’s masculine, the liver.
[Il regarde le cahier.]
Him: You, it’s “the time” with an “s”.
Her: No, the “s” is plural!
Him: No, there, it’s like “once upon a time”, so an “s”.
Like the show you watch, The voiceIt is The voice “x”, that’s how it is!
Her: But the “x” is because there are several singers!
Him: Yes, but no. One says “ The voice » “x”.
Her: Why isn’t it an “e”, first of all?
Him: Because the “e” way is like the path. It’s not complicated !
Her: Yes, it’s complicated!
Him: No, look, I have some things. “Faith”, believing, is often empty, it is often not true, so there is nothing afterwards. While “the time” – once “s” – like “the liver” “e”, feminine – the other is plural, it is the opposite. Like “the voice” “x”, except “the way” “e”, the path. That’s it, there !
French has been my working tool for four decades. Mistaking my account, the Paul Gérin-Lajoie Foundation one day approached me to host one of its PGL dictations. I refused. It would have been an imposture to concoct a difficult text with her, then to test it on the bollés in Quebec French, even though I knew I would fail miserably.
I have no objection to our elite scribes engaging in this exercise. The average person is expected to stay physically fit, not to complete a triathlon every year. So I don’t see why we demand from hundreds of millions of French speakers daily tests of complicated grammar, of rules where the exceptions are as numerous as the correct usages, of numerous misinterpretations, an overwhelming obligation to memorize spellings whose intrinsic logic is only known by historians of the language.
I have always been in favor of real spelling reform. Even more so since my six-year-old daughter wrote her first sentence: “Who lives better, the panter or the cargo?” » She had grasped the essential point. But rather than spending all of her subsequent French lessons expanding her vocabulary and navigating the rich nuances of pasts and futures, imagining a lovely turn of phrase, and therefore enjoying the pleasures of the language, she was forced, like us all, to struggle with every whim of a lady French language, to internalize its incongruities, to sometimes even be summoned to find its dysfunctions brilliant. What a waste of time, and above all what a waste of love for the language itself!
In his instructive The language told (All in all), the linguist specializing in the historical sociolinguistics of Quebec French Anne-Marie Beaudoin-Bégin explains how these complications were desired by… the French revolutionaries of 1789. Wanting to transform a linguistically diverse France into a single speaking nation, they established the uniform national education, from Provence to Normandy. The time was for major reforms — they were reimagining the whole of society, the law, the relationship to religion, even the calendar. Great opportunity to carry out a vast democratization of spelling and grammar, the complexity of which was then known only to a few nobles – who moreover did not care, the notion of “spelling error” did not not existing. We were now going to educate the illiterate people so that they could understand each other. Why was it necessary to impose on them several forms of the sound “o” (“o”, “au”, “eau”, “eault”), “f” and “ph”, grave and circumflex accents?
“If we had done it,” explains Beaudoin-Bégin, “French would have lost all its prestigious luster. Knowing how to write had once been a distinctive social sign. If everyone now learns to write, there needs to be another sign of social division: knowing how to write well. […] Language and respect for rules become methods of social exclusion. »
In short, revolutionary language is not popular language. It is always the language that distinguishes one from the other. A great opportunity wasted by pretension and class spirit.
Lucid, I know that it is illusory to hope to see real reform emerge in France. However, I dream of a Quebec government joining forces with, say, Wallonia and Senegal, to start the process. We could obviously start by following the recommendation of the International Federation of French Teachers, and their Quebec association, to simplify theostia agree with the past participle, in particular when having is taken to be specifically to annoy us. That would already be it. We would then proceed by stages of simplification, as languages less pretentious than ours have always done.
It would be a linguistic “Tower of Babel,” critics say. No more than when we read old French manuscripts, which we find charming with their old turns of phrase. There are complications similar to ours in this and that other language, we read. Yes, but cumulatively we are the champions.
To those who claim that we will lose subtlety and that we will “level down”, I remind you that French is today much simpler than it was when it was related to Latin, where the ending of each noun changes depending on its function in the sentence. This simplification prevented neither Verlaine nor Vigneault. That in Spanish only the letters “c”, “n” and “r” can be doubled does not seem to have handicapped García Márquez.
Others insist on subjecting our children to these hells which form intelligence and character. Were they opposed to the invention of the pulley, reducing the arduousness of work, and of the washing machine? I grant them that our ancestors were less overweight and had a lot of character. But they died very young.