Re: French reform (Re: C.Thalmann, & #1)

Jean-François Colson wrote:

> !!! Unicode UTF-8 !!!
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Elliott Lash" <erelion12@...>
> To: <CONLANG@...>
> Sent: Tuesday, April 12, 2005 8:26 AM
> Subject: Re: French reform (Re: C.Thalmann, & #1)
>
>
>> You're welcome :) I really did enjoy it. And I
>> realized a mistake I made in standard French
>> orthography, that perhaps rivals or beats the mistakes
>> in your reform orthography. I wrote: écrité, I guess I
>> got a little slap happy with my e-accent aigu. It's of
>> course écrit, oops.
>
>
> I though that was a little reform of the grammar. Such changes have
> already
> occured in the past centuries. Two examples come to my mind:
> - tistre (†) / tissu -> tisser / tissé
> - résoudre / résolu -> solutionner / solutionné
> ==> écrire / écrit -> écriter / écrité
>
> Back to my reform: I kept the "mute" final consonants because they are
> required to make the feminine forms and the "liaisons". If we wrote
> ékri /
> ékrit, the feminine would become as unpredictable in French as the plural
> presently is in German: someone studying the language systematically
> needs
> to look in a dictionary (or to ask a native) to find the right form.

You could simply put the feminine form in the dictionary.  That way
you'd only have a few irregular adjectives, which didn't remove the
final consonant in the masculine (before consonants).

Still, French doesn't need a massive reform.  Its pronunciation is
largely predictable from its spelling.  But I would like the word 'fils'
to be spelt 'fisse'.  Am I right in thinking that 'fils' is one of the
few nouns that comes from the direct (rather than the oblique) case in
French?

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