Re: French spelling scheme

I see Oskar's gone ahead with his spelling reform of French during my short
absence  :)

>> In respelling French, I set three aims: a) minimize or wholly eliminate
>> diacritics - I always resented the time it took me to type that French
>> homework;
i.e. make it more like Old French ;)

The diacritics were all (except occasionally, and unsystematically, a mark
like the acute - probably the old Latin 'apex') unknown before the 16th
cent.  Then grammarians & printers started using the darn things in vague
imitation of what they found in ancient Greek, recently 're-discovered'
during the Renaissance.

The acute was first used by Robert Etienne in his dictionary of 1530 to
distinguish final -e = [e] from final -e = [@].

The cedilla (little zed [zee to you US types]) was borrowed from medieval
Spanish by Geoffrey Tory (1530), but didn't become general till much later,
the 16th century writers being happy to use _cz_, _ce_ oe even _s_ where
modern French has c-cedilla.

The grave was used sparinly, mainly to distinguish homophones like _la_ and
_là_; but some theorists used it for other purpose, even including _è_ =
/@/.  Corneille was the first to advocate the use of _è_ to denote [E], but
this didn't become general till later.

The apostrophe to denote elision was introduced by Geoffrey Tory, and the
diaeresis and the circumflex (the latter to denote contraction) were
introduced by Sylvius (1532) - all three are in direct immitation of Greek.

But it took a while for these things to become widely used & systematized -
the modern system was not, in fact, fixed till the 19th century.

So eliminating diacritics will merely return French to an older system
which it had for most of its history  :)


b) make French more graphically similar to the other Romance
>> languages, and its ancestor, Latin; and c) all the while trying to bring
>> the orthography closer to the spoken language, especially in conjugations
>> and other morphological domains.
As far as I can see - (b) and (c) are almost diametrically opposed.  French
has, without question, departed further from its Vulgar Latin 'mother' than
any of its 'sister' languages have.  If, indeed, you represent spoken
French, the orthography must surely depart even more from other Romance
languages.

[snip]
>>
>> "Le quatorce juillet et la fete nationale de la France. Al jour d hui, les
>> drapels tricolores sont partout."
Umm - _al_ seems a poorer representation of /o/ than modern French _au_;
and _drapels_ doesn't suggest /drapo/ to me!

>> "Excusez moi, quele hore et il? Il et huit hore moin quart."
Why spell /wa/ as _oi_ ? This seems in direct contradiction of both (b) and
(c)!
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At 7:25 pm +0200 1/5/01, BP Jonsson wrote:
[snip]
>
>As for vowel spellings I would use the following, being unafraid of
>diacritics:
>
[vowels snipped]

I was under the impression that high & low /e/, i.e. [e] and [E], were no
longer phonemically distinct in contemporary French; and that similarly the
high & low /ø/, i.e. [ø] and [¦], were no longer phonemically distinct.
But I may be wrong on this.  /o/ and /O/, I believe, are still separate
phonemes.

Maybe Christophe can enlighten us.

I would be very tempted to follow the same spelling conventions as Breton, i.e.
{i} = /i/
{e} = /e/
{a} = /a/
{o} = /o/
{ou} = /u/
{eu} = /ø/
{u} = /y/

I await clarification on the phonemic status of high & low mid-vowels in
contemporary French before elaborating further.

I'd be tempted to use the inverted-e to denote /@/ (tho one could be bold
and follow the Welsh habit of writing {y}  ;)

>
>As for consonants I can think of several solutions, but I definitely would
>prefer _nh_ and _lh_ for palatalized _n_ and _l_.
Palatalized _l_?  It lingers on (if at all, now) only in parts of the South
& Switzerland; it also, I believe, survives in some northern Patois, but
not in any northern pronunciations of the standard language AFAIK.  The
French revolution which replaced _oi_ = [wE] with the modern /wa/, also
replaced the moribund [L] with the modern /j/.

But Oskar's spelling change seems to be archaizing, so I guess we're
talking here of the pre-revolutionary pronunciation.

The use of {nh} and {lh} for [J] and [L] BTW is the modern Breton usage  :)

>The silent _l_ idea is a
>good one,
Only if one likes introducing letters to denote long departed sounds for
merely etymological reasons.

I assume the "silent _l_" means the post-vocalic /l/ that became [w] (as in
much of modern Lonfon & the parts of south east England) and which the
French as early as the middle ages took to writing as {u}.  Of course the
resulting medieval diphthongs and triphthongs (as, e.g. in _beau_ /bj&w/
<-- _bel_) have become monophthongs in modern French.  But personally I see
no point in "restoring", e.g. _au_ /o/ to _al_ which spelling I don't think
is actually ever attested.  To spell /o/ as _al_ seems odd in a modern
spelling reform; indeed, it seems to me an orthographic deform, not reform.

but then _ll_ is needed to indicate pronounced final /l/, since
>"silent e" is actuallu pronounced by some people it cannot be inserted
>where not etymologically justified.
Indeed, "silent e" gets pronounced by very many people in certain contexts
and/or under certain conditions.

Another problem - which Oskar may have addressed; I missed his initial
mailing - are final consonants; e.g. _aout_ (August) is normally pronounced
/ut/, with final /t/, in contemporary French, but loses its final /t/ in
the compound _mi-aout_ /miu/ (Mid-August, the feast of the Assumption [Aug.
15th]).   Similarly while _Christ_ is /krist/, once it is compounded the
final consonants go, thus: _Jésus-Christ_ /jezykri/.   There are other
examples which I don't recall off-hand.

Tho I guess if "silent-l" is 'restored', then these final consonants will
stay in all written environments; if so, the reformed spelling does not
seem to me to indicate actual French pronunciation any better than the
current standard orthography does.

Ray.



=========================================
A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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