Saturday 16 October 2010

Français Nouveau

I enjoyed learning the French language at school. Despite being handicapped by the typical English reticence against putting on an accent I managed to scrape an A at GCSE (back in the days when GCSEs were more exam oriented than module based.) My main frustration with the French language was all the gender nonsense around nouns, and the masculinisation or feminisation of their verbs depending on the object.

When I got to university I heard about a synthetic language, Esperanto, broadly based on romance language structure which was entirely regular and straightforward. Esperanto was created in the 1880’s by Dr. Ludovic Lazarus Zamenhof, who hoped the language would foster harmony between people from different countries. I heartily wish Esperanto was widely taught as a second language. If it were more broadly spoken I would have taken the time to learn it. After all, what help is French when you’re in Spain, Russia or China?

Failing that – do you think we can persuade the French to drop all the gender complications from their language? Perhaps then the French language would catapult into being the international Lingua Franca. When I searched to see if such a Français Nouveau could ever come about I found this:

L'Académie Française, the prestigious organization which regulates the French language, shocked Francophones around the world with its announcement of wide-sweeping changes to make French «plus facile et moins agaçant» (easier and less aggravating).

This project, known as La Simplification, includes the elimination of such exaspérant grammatical aspects as gender, agreement, être as an auxiliary verb (avoir will now be used for all verbs), reflexive verbs «sauf ceux qui sont réfléchis en anglais», and - most annoying of all - the subjunctive. Details about implementing these changes (for example, how French speakers will distinguish between le manche [handle] and la manche [sleeve] once gender is eliminated) are not yet available.

Académie française immortel Valéry Giscard-d'Estaing had this to say about the unexpected and far-reaching changes:

«La langue française est très jolie, et nous voulons encourager plus de gens à l'apprendre. Lors d'une séance de remue-méninges, on s'est rendu compte du fait que notre belle langue est difficile pour les Anglophones, et donc pourquoi pas éliminer les aspects les plus difficiles et agaçants ?»

"The French language is very pretty, and we want to encourage more people to learn it. During a brainstorming session, we realized that our beautiful language is difficult for English speakers, so why not eliminate the most difficult and annoying aspects?"

There will be a few pronunciation and spelling changes as well: the French R will be replaced with the Spanish R (as it is generally agreed that the English R is too weird but at least the Spanish one is interesting) and silent letters will be dropped. Most accents will be eliminated as well, except those which distinguish between words. For example, théâtre will be theatre, but dû (past participle of devoir) will keep its accent to distinguish it from du (partitive article).

In order to have time to rewrite grammar books and dictionaries, La Simplification will launch officially one year from today - on April Fool's Day! Poisson d'avril !

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