I must admit that I put the cart before the horse by getting enthusiastic about the “rational ortografe”, which is still only a project. On the other hand, what is indeed official (and now taught in schools) are the famous “spelling corrections” of 1990, also called new spelling, which affected more than 5,000 words. I have often referred to it, but it is high time to get to the bottom of this. I will therefore give here the details of the recommendations which are now taught and exposed in all the reference works.
To take stock of the situation, I called in support the Quebec linguist Chantal Contant, professor at UQAM, who is the great guru of the new spelling. His Grand Vademecum of Modern Recommended Spelling is THE world reference: there is Chantal Contant in Antidote, Word, the Bescherelle, the Hatchet, the Robert, the Larousse, Usito, the Multi.
Before going into detail, Chantal Contant wants to contradict some stubborn myths. “It is wrong to think that with the new spelling, the plural of ‘horse’ has become ‘horses’,” she says. A reader brought out this old scarecrow to me recently. However, the new spelling never tried to change that (although it should, in my opinion). We still write “horses”. And “elephant”, rather than “elephant” – another scarecrow.
“Whenever we talk about a new spelling, people immediately think of ‘ognon, nénufar, exéma’, which are in fact alterations to a few words that needed to be fixed. This concerned barely sixty of the 5,000 words changed by the new spelling, ”explains the linguist. “The aim was rather to standardize certain rules by eliminating exceptions and special cases. Many are so obvious that they have become widespread even among those who say they refuse the new spelling, especially with regard to plurals, the joining of compound words and compound numerals. “
Standardized rules
Here is an overview of what the new spelling represents. Obviously, I summed up “to the bone”. For more details, you can consult the Great vademecum by Chantal Contant, the site The new spelling Where that of the Office québécois de la langue française.
1) plurals
Two kinds of plural are affected: that of foreign words and that of words composed with a hyphen.
For foreign words, it’s very simple: we put an s everywhere: “spaghetti, sandwiches”. In the traditional spelling, the plural of “match” or “sandwich” rather imitates the English rule (“matches, sandwiches”).
For words composed with a hyphen, it’s simple. In the verb + noun cases, the verb remains invariable and the noun takes an s: “mouthwashes”. The same rule applies to words composed in the preposition + noun form, such as “hors-jeux”. All other compound words follow the traditional spelling.
The plurals of welded words (see next rule) are also normalized: “gurglous, millipede”.
2) The welding of words
We eliminate the hyphen and we weld two words in the following cases: all the learned words (“musculoskeletal, cumulonimbus”), all the words with prefixes of the type “contr (e) -, entr (e) -, co-, over-, supra-, extra-, infra-, intra-, ultra- ”. The same goes for onomatopoeia (“plicplic, glougou”). And for words composed on the verb + all model (“fourretout, essuietout”). In the case of “contr (e) -” and “entr (e) -“, we also eliminate the e followed by a vowel, as in “contrattaque” or “counterspionage”.
However, the hyphen is maintained where the weld would create a pronunciation defect, such as “bio-industrial, intra-university” instead of “bio-industrial, intra-university”.
For compound numerals, on the other hand, the hyphen is generalized everywhere. We write “two hundred, two-million-eight”. It was much more complicated in the old system.
More anecdotally, the welding rule is extended to other compound words, including those with “bas, haut, mal, mille” (such as “millepatte”), although certain words corresponding to this characteristic are exempt, such as “bas -relief ”. Other common compounds, such as “vanupied, bats, fairepart”, also obey this new rule.
3) Circumflexes, umlauts and other accents
We rationalize the use of the umlaut whose function is to divide a digraph (a sound written with two letters), by starting by correcting half a dozen faulty spellings. We now write “acute, ambiguous”. We clarify a few cases that have never been resolved, such as “arguer” which becomes “arguer”. As for “gageüre”, it is a question of underlining that the word is indeed supposed to rhyme with “parlure” rather than with “speaker”.
The circumflex accent disappears on the i’s and u’s. The only cases where it is maintained (“due, ripe, sure, fast”) aim to avoid homonyms. The same applies to certain conjugations of the verb “to grow” which merge with “to believe”.
For borrowed foreign words, we generalize the accentuation to conform the writing to the pronunciation, so “media, ego, facies, à capella”.
All the verbs with an accent (“to dry, release, settle”) take the grave accent in the future and conditional (on the model of “cèdera” and “lèvera”).
4) Double consonants
All verbs in –eler and –eter follow the pattern of “freezes” or “buys”. Except for “to call” and “to throw” and their compounds (“to recall, interject”), as well as “to challenge”, which keep the traditional spelling (“I call, I throw, I call”).
In addition, nouns derived from these verbs adopt the same pattern. The verb “to run off”, which is now conjugated “to run off”, thus gives “to run off” with a single “l”.
Words in -olle are passed to -ole (except for established words such as “colle, folle, molle”). And the same logic goes for –otter words that turn into –oter, such as “frizz, shiver, toss”, with a number of exceptions.
The disaster of anomalies
As we will have seen, the “thinkers” of the new spelling had good ideas. However, they significantly weakened their proposal by two decisions. First, by creating new inexplicable exceptions to rules that are nonetheless simple. And then adding a whole series of targeted edits outside of the boxes for more or less randomly chosen words. As if, faced with two broken arms, we had decided to repair one and amputate two toes.
“Yes, but all the same, they have greatly reduced the number of exceptions,” says Chantal Contant, who was too young at the time to be consulted (she was a student). However, to hear her, one feels that she would have gone further. “Me, I’m a grammarian-computer scientist at the start, so I don’t like exceptions. “
As for the exceptions to the rules set out above, there is an impression of arbitrariness, with no apparent plan. For example, we say that we do not solder for words composed of three words, but for “vanupuied”, it is yes. No matter how much I look for logic, I can’t find it.
In some cases, we can discern this logic. In particular, words in -illier become -iller, such as “hardware” or “jeweler”.
But for accents, we do not follow any clear system. It’s nice to add an accent to “Québécois” and to conform “creamery” to “cream”, but why then “lightening, dryness”, without touching “lighten, dry”? “Event” instead of “event”, okay, but why stop there?
We also carried out targeted modifications of isolated cases such as “onion” and “water lily”, which should never have been emblematic of this project. In doing so, the thinkers of the new spelling have lent themselves to criticism for little.
In the case of “water lily”, it was a question of correcting a mistake introduced by the French Academy in its 1935 dictionary, where it was written “water lily” while previous editions gave “water lily”. Apparently our immortals had believed it to be a Greek word, when it is Persian.
As for “ognon”, it’s very interesting. In the Renaissance, it was decided to put an i in front of some gn to signify that it was a digram for the sound ñ, rather than gn detached. In order to mark that it was not necessary to say “og-no”, an i was introduced, therefore “onion”. It has been done fairly systematically for “onion, handle, mountain.” Over the generations, the convention has been reinterpreted very differently. For “handle”, people began to pronounce “pwagne”, while others said “pogne”. We therefore maintained the i. The reverse happened for “mountain”: as no one said “mountain”, the French Academy eventually withdrew the i. (The spelling of the names retains interesting vestiges, such as that of the author Michel de Montaigne, which everyone erroneously pronounces “mountain”, but which was once called “mountain”). Oddly enough, the convention remained intact with “onion” and the reformers thought it best to bring “ognon” back to conform to the pronunciation.
Unfortunately, that was one too many novelty and “Onion” was a PR disaster, as we will see in my next column.
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