Renowned linguists and writers are calling on institutions to simplify several spelling rules. And the impacts would be numerous.
What if the spelling rules learned at school were a little simplified? The French are very attached to their language but they are aware that it is difficult to learn and apply without making mistakes. A recent Ifop survey shows in this regard that the French overwhelmingly declare themselves “sensitive to correct spelling, both when they write (93%) and when they read (88%)”. At the same time, “nearly one in two (45%) believe that the school system is not efficient enough in learning spelling”.
So, should we make French more accessible? Several dozen experts, linguists, academics and cultural figures – including the Nobel Prize winner for literature Annie Ernaux – have just signed a column in Le Monde to demand an “update of our spelling”. “You can be good at French, through the richness of your vocabulary, your creativity and your argument, and bad at spelling. And this is more and more the case today,” they argue, highlighting that he learning tedious rules takes teachers dozens of hours to learn, to the detriment of other learning, such as “creative writing and comprehension.”
The authors of the article emphasize that “spelling, born with the printing press, has continued, over time, to be reworked by grammarians, printers, and by the French Academy until the end of the 19th century.” And so it would be time to get back to it. “The idea is not to simplify everything or write phonetically, but to improve the graphic system to teach it better. Today, the thinking is very advanced, we know what we can modify without damage to the meaning or pronunciation, and without slowing down the reading,” they write.
Experts and writers believe that “the first step would be to reform the agreement of the past participle, and to agree to leave it invariable when it is conjugated with “avoir””. So no more “the story I read” or “the thing I did”, make way for “the story I read” and “the thing I did”. Curious ? It must be admitted that this COD rule placed before the verb is not well understood.
But another more common rule, learned by everyone at school, is called into question: thus, these intellectuals would like to “regularize plurals into “-s”, by renouncing the final “-x”. “Let’s once again allow “pous” as “under”, and “pieus” as “tyres”. So no more “cabbages, jewels, toys, knees, stones, owls, lice”, all these words would end with an -s, just like the plural of table would be written “tableaux”.
“If you find that these Byzantine agreements and these strange exceptions give all the charm to our spelling, it is because it is the only version that was taught to you from childhood, and that you attach a particular emotional charge to it. . Our ancestors surely found “poet” and “laws” prettier than “poet” and “laws””, further argue the authors of the column, who wish to quickly see “institutions, but also the media, publishing houses, companies of the digital” offer “texts, messages, in new spelling”.
