The author of a text published in your pages uses in her title the swear word: “elitism”, very fashionable to destroy what one denounces (“The elitism of French spelling”, The dutyB 10, July 13-14, 2024). With this reservation, however: what is fashionable is not an argument. She deplores the fact that the time devoted to spelling is “stolen from reading comprehension, writing, argumentation, vocabulary”: by Jove, how can we understand what we read, write, argue logically, use a diversified vocabulary if we do not know the language in which we do it? And what is this argument which consists of saying that if Hispanic languages do it, French must imitate them?
We do not solve a problem by avoiding it. The issue of vocabulary, spelling, agreement of the past participle or the imperfect subjunctive, goes beyond a simple grammatical question: mastery of the structures of the language is nothing less than the condition of correct thought.
Everything is the circulation of signs in society, starting with the rules of traffic: what happens if a strong mind does not take into account the meaning of the word stop at an intersection and rushes into sheer terror? Nothing but bumps. It is clear that if we refuse the effort to assimilate vocabulary, spelling and the rules of language signs, we remain defeated by the difficulty. In this regard, the teaching of the sacrosanct “oral French” has already caused enough damage.
Writing from a sound and not from a rule inherent to writing is not writing, it is tracing a sign over which one has no control, in other words it is not knowing what one is doing. We must return from the narrow definition of language as the emission of sounds: on the contrary, it is the very edifice of thought, and not only is a language that one has not made the effort to appropriate a jargon of some kind, but also reveals a thought that one does not possess.
Periodically, “experts” in the field come up with paralogisms to weaken the official language of Quebec. To cure this obsession, they would do well to return to the works of the boss, the linguist Émile Benveniste, for whom “what we state delimits and organizes what we think.” This is of course a two-way formula: when the enunciation is mutilated, the thought is too; but to arrive at a coherent, balanced enunciation, there is no other method than the formation of a thought in the crucible of vocabulary, spelling and structures of the language – in the same way that an alchemist arrives at his drop of gold.