Will the French ortograph be reformed? (Specific Languages) Language Learning Forum

Will the French ortograph be reformed?
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Gusutafu
Senior Member
Sweden
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Message 25 of 55

17 November 2010 at 11:31am | IP Logged

Lucas wrote:

But saying that circumflexes are useful because they can help you to learn french
othograph is ridiculous...it's like confusing the cause and the consequence!
:)

It would indeed be ridiculous, that's why I'm not saying it.
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simonov
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Portugal
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Message 26 of 55

17 November 2010 at 4:38pm | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

You could talk forever justifying the current state of affairs, but the fact of the matter is that -ent and -ent as distinct phonemes do complicate French orthography unnecessarily

For whom? A spelling reform is usually made for the benefit of native speakers.
Besides, I have never come across a French child who had trouble distinguishing those 2 phonemes that you find so impossible.

Cainntear wrote:

I suspect that the first thing to happen would have been the reduction of 3rd plural -ENT to -ET.

The result would have been confusion with existing -ET words, as you say, but that would likely have been corrected quickly by a simple shift of your "un muet" to "un muét", which is consistent and obvious within the language as a whole.

You've lost me. Instead of an easy -nt rule (cf. below) you want to introduce an extra, totally unnecessary accent aigu? -ET is always pronounced /é/ and therefore doesn't need a written accent. Unless you want to now go and put a litte acute on every syllable ending in -ET, except of course on the new 3rd p.plural -ET form. I'm sure French children would be delighted by your 'simplification'. They already don't know accent yes/no? if yes, which accent? put it where?

Cainntear wrote:

I might be wrong about how it would have panned out, but in the absence of authorities, spellings generally change to follow the spoken language, and that N just doesn't match anything in the spoken language.

As I've said, repeatedly, there is a very easy to learn rule in French: 3rd person plural verb forms end in -nt. The norm is mute -Ent in all tenses and modes (ils chantent, finissent, recoivent, ouvrent, ouvraient, ouvriraient, qu'ils veuillent, voulurent, finirent, chantèrent, [qu'ils chantassent] etc. etc) except for some that have to have an O (instead of the E) to match the spoken language! Both that O and that N are needed to produce the nasal sound we hear in: ils ont, sont, font, vont, seront etc.

Well, I'm glad that you at least seem to find easy what most people consider really difficult:
   Spelling final /é/ sound: -er, -ez, -et, -é, ée (and their plural forms)
   Accord du participe passé
   Plural of compound nouns and adjectives
Plus all those niggly bits alluded to in previous posts by s_allard and myself.

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Cainntear
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Message 27 of 55

17 November 2010 at 5:19pm | IP Logged

simonov wrote:

Cainntear wrote:

You could talk forever justifying the current state of affairs, but the fact of the matter is that -ent and -ent as distinct phonemes do complicate French orthography unnecessarily

For whom? A spelling reform is usually made for the benefit of native speakers.

For native speakers. I agree that a spelling reform should be for the native speakers and internal to the language.

Quote:

Besides, I have never come across a French child who had trouble distinguishing those 2 phonemes that you find so impossible.

There's a huge difference between "unnecessarily complicated" and "impossible", so please stick to what I said rather than building a strawman.

Quote:

That was not what I "want to introduce", it was my hypothesis of what would have already happened to French orthography without the conscious influence of the Académie and school teachers supporting an orthography that is not directly related to the spoken language.

This would be a simplification, because the currently -et ending has the vowel quality of é, and the only reason that I can see for this irregular vowel orthography is for graphical consistency and etymology transparency between masculine and feminine forms -- muet/muette -- but isn't it a bit odd to have graphical consistency where the sounds are distinct?

Remember, though that this is a prediction, a hypothesis... it is not a recommendation.

Quote:

That is a different ending. The sound is completely different, but illiterate speakers have no problem with them. Even French infants don't have any problem with them that they wouldn't have with any other irregular verbs.

Yes, the rule is "easy" when analysed as a conscious rule, but the rule is not intuitive and so it is therefore not trivial to apply in practice. The fact that millions of people write it correctly is not proof that it is efficient, but that it is a mostly bearable efficiency.
Anecdotal, true, but I have been told that it is one of the most common spelling mistakes French natives make. This proves that it is actually quite difficult.
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Haldor
Triglot
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France
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Studies: French, Spanish

Message 28 of 55

17 November 2010 at 6:28pm | IP Logged

kerateo wrote:

In a hundred years everyone will use the "cell phone texting ortography", I have to admit, I have a college degree and Spanish has a much easier ortography than french, but I have no clue how to use accents and I get confused sometimes with "S vs C vs Z" and "b vs v". If it wasnt for microsoft word I would be practically illiterate.

Yes, French ortograph is a nightmare. For a country that uses hundreds of millions of euros to export their own language they use a monstrously difficult spelling system. While more, yes more irregular than English, check -French language profile on this page-, there are sometimes twenty different ways to write one sound.. Logic, not tremendously..
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simonov
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Portugal
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Message 29 of 55

17 November 2010 at 7:55pm | IP Logged

Cainntear wrote:

simonov wrote:

I have never come across a French child who had trouble distinguishing those 2 phonemes that you find so impossible.

There's a huge difference between "unnecessarily complicated" and "impossible", so please stick to what I said rather than building a strawman.

What strawman? You keep saying that it is complicated, when in actual fact it is not. No French speaking person I've met has ever had any problem distinguishing 3rd person plural -ent verb ending from -ent adjective ending.

Cainntear wrote:

simonov wrote:

.....The norm is mute -Ent in all tenses and modes except for some that have to have an O (instead of the E) to match the spoken language!

[QUOTE=Cainntear]
Yes, the rule is "easy" when analysed as a conscious rule, but the rule is not intuitive and so it is therefore not trivial to apply in practice. The fact that millions of people write it correctly is not proof that it is efficient, but that it is a mostly bearable efficiency.
Anecdotal, true, but I have been told that it is one of the most common spelling mistakes French natives make. This proves that it is actually quite difficult.

Who has told you that? Proof of the difficulty of the -ent verb ending? It is in fact one of the least common [Brealspelling mistakes. One that people sometimes make, not because they don't know, but because they're not paying attention. Anyway, when one doesn't pay attention, one tends to make silly mistakes.
But at the outset you were referring to the difficulty arising when reading -ent, so why are you now changing to "writing".
My conclusion still stands: no need to change the -ent verb ending, because the remedy would be worse than the disease: too many other changes would have to be made, in writing and in speech..

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Levi
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Message 30 of 55

17 November 2010 at 8:15pm | IP Logged

I'm thinking it would actually be more practical to change adjectives that end in '-ent' (and their corresponding nouns in '-ence') to '-ant' (and '-ance'). But I rather like French orthography the way it is, even if it isn't optimally consistent. For what its worth, I've never had difficulty with the two possible pronunciations of '-ent'; if I'm paying any attention at all to parsing the sentence I'm reading, it's pretty clear which words are adjectives and which are verbs. I'd be curious to know if anyone has any actual examples of potentially ambiguous sentences.

Edited by Levi on 17 November 2010 at 8:17pm
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Gusutafu
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Sweden
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Message 31 of 55

17 November 2010 at 8:29pm | IP Logged

I've always found French orthography one of the easiest to grasp. Perhaps it's difficult if you try to write down the rules, but if you approach it like you approach your own language, it's extremely intuitive. Swedish spelling is probably very difficult if you attempt to construct a systematic correspondance between sound and letters, but that is a stupid approach. Learn to speak the language, then write it, and don't worry too much about individual letters, that only leads you astray.
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Cainntear
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Message 32 of 55

17 November 2010 at 8:35pm | IP Logged

simonov wrote:

Who has told you that? Proof of the difficulty of the -ent verb ending? It is in fact one of the least common realspelling mistakes. One that people sometimes make, not because they don't know, but because they're not paying attention.

And that is precisely my point. You should not have to think about the form of what you're writing, just as you don't consciously think about the pronunciation. It's a complication because it forces you to think about form, which distracts you from

Quote:

But at the outset you were referring to the difficulty arising when reading -ent, so why are you now changing to "writing".

I'm talking about orthography as a whole. The process is symmetrical. Literacy involves the brain associating written forms with sounds. The harder something is to associate with a sound, the harder it is to read and write. The sound represented by -ENT can only be worked out using extra data from elsewhere in the sentence. This makes more work from the brain. The more work it is to read or write the form, the less attention can be paid to the actual content of the message.

Quote:

My conclusion still stands: no need to change the -ent verb ending, because the remedy would be worse than the disease: too many other changes would have to be made, in writing and in speech..

Nonsense -- no changes would have to be made in speech. You could rewrite the -ent ending as -zrg if you wanted and no changes would have to be made in speech. (However, it would make reading and writing harder.)

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