13th October 2008

'It's a scandalous attack on 500 years of French history', say the masses. Yet more economic woes? No. Someone has actually had the temerity to tinker with their beloved language. What chutzpah. Yes, France is in deep shock because dictionary 'Le Petit Robert' has relaxed its language rules. In the most sweeping linguistic reform in France for centuries, the nation's premier dictionary has cast aside tradition to allow alternative spellings for thousands of words. Accents have become optional, consonants can be doubled on a whim and hyphens will float in and out of literary texts under the changes imposed by Alain Rey, the linguist responsible for the opus. “We have to make spelling simpler,” he said. “It's too complicated and it's not surprising that schoolchildren have trouble learning it.” Well yes. It causes a few problems for we immigrants of a certain age too! A few weeks ago, for a bit of fun, I went along to a local village hall to participate in one of France's annual, national, dictee competitions. It was all very formal, with sealed envelopes which were opened at a precise time all over the country. I don't think I did very well, the problems, as usual, being all those feminine endings, accents and tenses. But the hall had its usual number of local French all sitting down to concentrate hard. Can you imagine that happening in England? But I've long noticed different French spellings anyway, e.g. clé or clef (for key), or imbecillite or imbecilite....enough said. However, the initiative has sparked a furious row in a country that has clung to la langue française as a pillar of its identity ever since King François I made it the official language in 1539. The controversy has now spread to internet forums, where users have denounced the arrival of text-message terms at the heart of Gallic culture.
So, how are we old codgers dealing with all this? Him indoors will still use the pictures in his Brico depot catalogue to point to things he needs. That is, of course, until he's suffering from something unmentionable and then it's poor old-suffering me, of course, who needs to translate in the Pharmacie. Nothing much changes here.