7 ms·

The circumflex: a battle over an accent mark

48 points by Perados 11y ago

hobarrera 11y ago
> it suggested to remove the circumflex from above the letters ‘i’ and ‘u’ where the accent does not change the pronunciation nor the meaning of the word, as in ‘paraître’ (to appear) or ‘coût’ (cost). Looks like it's a functional change. I'm a spanish speaker, and would hate to see all the accents go, because they indicate how a word must be pronounced. But we too, have cases which don't indicate anything, and I'd like to see these equally gone.
- jhanschoo 11y ago
  To be fair, I don't remember that the circumflex should signify a change in pronunciation in standard French.
  - elros 11y ago
    Nowadays it's mostly only the case on the letter <e>, where it indicates a pronunciation of /ɛ/. In the past, when put on a <a> it changed it from /a/ to /ɑ/, however that mostly fell in disuse in most French French dialects and I can only hear the distinction consistently in Canadian French dialects.
  - pascalmahe 11y ago
    That's the thing, this specific reform only removes the accent when it doesn't have any impact. It's really about cleaning up inconstencies and weird edge cases.
  - talideon 11y ago
    Once upon a time, it did and in some varieties still does: its origin was in a lost /s/ (later other deleted consonants too, IIRC), which lead to compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. You can still see this in some varieties of French, such as Belgian and Swiss French, which preserve the old long vowels somewhat better than metropolitan French.
zdkl 11y ago
My name is spelled with an accent circonflexe, imagine my reaction when I learned this :) To further the griping frenchman's cliché, good luck getting me to drop it; The sentimental value, the culture, merde!
- eloisant 11y ago
  The accent circonflexe is not going anywhere. They're only dropping it from some words on "u" or "i" where it doesn't bring anything, either for prononciation or to distinguish from a different word. So it will disappear from "coût" and "paraître" but not from "jeûne" (because "jeune" has a different meaning). It's staying to "e" and "a" (être for example). Too many people read headlines, not articles. The rumor that the accent circonflexe will be gone completely has spread up because people are too lazy checking the source and just dumbly repeat what they hear.
  - zdkl 11y ago
    Oh I did read the article, and I understand that this is aimed to encourage dual-use, rather than excluding one or the other. I was merely expressing myself in favour of continuing to use it, even though their omission is not an error anymore. If they really wanted to simplify things they'd be better served looking into rules about the place of the COD and 'avoir'... I have traumatic memories from primary school french lessons ;) (Also, while I agree with it's spirit, I resent the hostility about your misunderstanding of my post)
  - thiht 11y ago
    What's funny about that is that most people complaining about the accent circonflexe disappearing already don't use it where it's supposed to be used. They already apply most of the 1990 reform they complain about without knowing it.
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      What evidence do you have that the people that complain about the reform are the same that unconsciously leave away the accent circonflexe? I rather think these two groups are rather disjoint.
pif 11y ago
As an Italian living in France, I've noticed a pattern: several times, a circumflex in French corresponds to an "S" lost from its Latin origin. Examples: FR "coût" - EN "cost" - IT "costo" - LAT "constare" FR "crêpe" - EN "crêpe" - IT "crespella" - LAT "crispus" FR "tôt" - EN "soon" - IT "tosto" - LAT "tostus" FR "château" - EN "castle" - IT "castello" - LAT "castellum"
- carlob 11y ago
  (As an Italian who has lived in France, but is now fortunately back to our sunny shores ;) ). I'm pretty sure it's something most people are taught in school when learning French. Notice that it's not just S. For example mûr is mature, so it's a whole syllable there. There is a whole discipline called phonétique historique and all future high school French teacher have to learn it (at least the ones that pass the Agrégation), which basically tells the story of how words have transformed from their Latin to their French pronunciation. Unfortunately the approach that is taught is not rigorously scientific and you get to learn just a bunch of rules of thumb.
  - pif 11y ago
    > most people are taught in school when learning French You probably mean: when learning French _in Italy_. If you learn it in France, there is usually no comparison with Italian or Latin, so this specific pattern is just lost.
    - carlob 11y ago
      Yes, I meant as a foreign romance language of course. My point was that it's funny that you've discovered it independently.
    - bambax 11y ago
      I don't know what the parent meant, but I can assure you that in France you're (usually) taught that the ^ stands for a lost letter -- it's what helps remember where to put the accent.
elcapitan 11y ago
As the article mentions, Germany had a big battle around such changes 20 years ago. It has settled down since. Some things in language are pretty arbitrary, and if it's a sufficiently small group of changes, it's probably no big deal to make that change. Matters would be totally different for English I guess ;) In general I would oppose changes to the language by committee, in particular politically motivated ones, but this seems to be fairly uncontroversial (only that it defies tradition, but "natural" changes in language do so too).
- wolfgke 11y ago
  The problem in the new German spelling was rather that lots of things simply did not make sense. For example: "Gemse" (old spelling, which is also how you speak it) vs. "Gämse" (new spelling that was "intended" to be derived from "Gams". Unluckily "Gams" is a dialect word, while "Gemse" is the original German one). Or an IMHO even more drastic example "aufwendig" (old spelling; also how you speak it) vs. "aufwändig" (new spelling). The official reason is that aufwendig/aufwändig is derived from the noun "Aufwand". But you can also give good reasons why it makes sense to derive it from the verb "aufwenden". No person could explain me the reason why the noun was chosen over the verb. So yes, I am open to a sane spelling reform. But the one that was implemented in Germany clearly wasn't. If you want to do a spelling reform for the deep impact it will have, it must be (nearly) perfect - an analog in software engineering is "lots of nines of availability". If you are not able to reach this gold standard you better leave it.
  - elcapitan 11y ago
    I agree, they should have changed the verb "aufwenden" to "aufwänden", to make it completely consistent: "Aufwand"-"aufwänden"-"aufwändig". Other than that, I didn't mean to take that as an example of a great implementation. It's just that it happened and it didn't cause too many deaths, from what I remember.
    - wolfgke 11y ago
      > I agree, they should have changed the verb "aufwenden" to "aufwänden", to make it completely consistent But then you also have to change "wenden" -> "wänden" and "abwenden" zu "abwänden". If we conjugate this, we get "ich wände mich ab" (1st person singular). But unluckily "ich wände mich ab" is already the Conjunctive II of "abwenden" (also 1st person singular). So the consequences of changing the the spelling of "aufwenden" are much deeper than it looks on the first view. My answer is rather to find an abstract, but completely general rule from which words adjectives are to be derived: the noun or the verb.
bambax 11y ago
This whole affair is the symptom of a deeper tragedy, that of the French "orthographe" (meaning "proper spelling"). Orthographe is a rather recent notion, that appeared well after the creation of the Académie française (1635), I would say somewhere in the middle of the 18th century, and then became the universal enforceable "norm" that it is today, in the middle of the following century (19th). Before that, you could spell French any which way you liked; most authors spelled the same word differently, not just in different works, but in the same page, and not depending on context either. And it wasn't a problem, because it can be argued that the best works of French literature were written at a time when orthographe didn't exist. There were "grammarians" that insisted that there should be some rules and that they should be followed, but they were objects of universal scorn and mockery. Then, I'm not sure exactly how, grammarians won, and now we have orthographe. Orthographe is a tragedy for two reasons: - it's mainly, or uniquely, a social marker - it's so complex and so arbitrary, it takes between 5 and 10 years of arduous study to learn. And after people learn it, they become attached to it, it becomes part of their identity, and it continues to be enforced and imposed on children as a matter of course, without any objection from anybody. For the record, I'm a very good (or by most metrics, excellent) French speller, but I'm also a parent and am heartbroken to see my kids spend the best part of their young lives learning this thing that has absolutely no extrinsic or intrinsic value whatsoever. They could learn music, or drawing, or cooking, or woodworking, or go play outdoors, but there's no time, because orthographe is so damn hard it takes all of the time in school, and more time at home. Hard and useless. The worst part is it's not a fight you can fight on your own -- decide that your kids won't learn orthographe after all -- because that would cause them a huge disservice: the social marker part means that those who can't spell are excluded from normal society and have a very hard time finding jobs (any job). Many social problems in French society -- including, I really think so, recent outbursts of "terrorism" -- have at least some roots in the actual terror and tragedy of orthographe. If you can't learn orthographe you can't be a member of French society, and in order to learn orthographe you have to already be a member of said society. Do I like the current reform? No, I think it's stupid and counter-productive, because it adds an alternative spelling to 2000 or so words; the alternative spelling may be simpler, but the addition raises complexity instead of lowering it. -- The point is to get rid of orthographe, not double it.
- 11y ago
legulere 11y ago
It's pretty silly how people get outraged about the smallest changes in the writing system. In Germany the last real changes were made over 100 years ago (removal of C, Th, etc.). There are so many things where there's no justification to do it the way it's done now. That we write a few words with v instead of f helps nobody. The tons of ways we mark long vocals only confuse. S only being pronounced sh in front of p and t is pretty arbitrary, you use the rule for all consonants and become more similar to the other Germanic languages (e.g. Schweden -> Sweden, schmelzen -> smelzen). You could write ts instead of z, because that's how we actually pronounce it and it would be easier to understand for speakers of other germanic languages (smeltsen). But no that would be seen as the downfall of our culture or something.
- gpvos 11y ago
  You are almost proposing to adopt Dutch spelling. :)
  - legulere 11y ago
    I'm actually more influenced by Swedish spelling, where I saw how nice things could be. Separating ij and ei (which were long i and ai in protogermanic) seems pretty cool to me as it makes it more obvious for other germanic languages what the corresponding word is (drijven seems more similar to drive than to treiben), however I guess it's really hard for people to remember which of the two is the correct one for each word when they're pronounced the same.
    - gpvos 11y ago
      I don't know enough about Swedish spelling, but there seem to be quite some irregularities such as the g sometimes being pronounced as j, and o sometimes as u, but there is probably some rule to those. As you show, Dutch has its share of weirdness too, of course.
- wolfgke 11y ago
  Being German, I find the idea interesting, though not without flaws. There will have to be lots of exceptions to your proposed rule (s before consonant is spoken "sch"), where the s has to be spoken "as usual": "sk": Skelett (skeleton) or Skunk (skunk) "sl": Slowenien, Slowakei (slovenia, slovakia) "sm": Smaragd (emerald), Smegma
gulpahum 11y ago
The French are going to get a new standardized keyboard, partly to protect the language. [1] Would dropping circumflexes help creating a simpler keyboard? [1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change-keyboard-layout-azerty http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change-key...
- pascalmahe 11y ago
  No: the accent is only dropped when it doesn't affect pronunciation. When it's used to differentiate between two words, otherwise spelled the same, it stays. And the reform was deigned 25 years ago, so there is no link between it and the desire to create a simpler keybord.
mcv 11y ago
I hate these kind of imposed spelling reforms. I'd much rather let language evolve naturally. Dutch has also had a very controversial spelling reform in the 1990s, which changed some very logical spelling rules into very arbitrary ones. I still resist, but I seem to be the only one. Pannekoek!
- jordigh 11y ago
  > I'd much rather let language evolve naturally. Spelling isn't natural though, as there are many humans without writing but practically none without language. Writing has always been at the whims of standardisation, whether "officially" so like the French Academy or Sejong did for French and Hangul, or just by convention like Webster did for American English, simplifying the spelling that Oxford had previously promoted.
- m_t 11y ago
  > imposed spelling reforms It is not imposed at all. It is a recommendation that was set in 1990, and accept both writing of the words. Why is it coming back in the news? That's a pretty complex question.
  - pif 11y ago
    Because, starting in September 2016, the new ortographe will be taught at school.
buserror 11y ago
As a french programmer, since I'm about 12, and expatriate for about 20 years, I learned long ago that: 1) I needed a qwerty keyboard do I don't develop RSI trying to type braces on a french one. 2) I also decided that getting RSI trying to type the accents on a qwerty keyboard was silly. I thus type french without any accents at all. Sometime the result is funny :-)
- athenot 11y ago
  Similar situation here but I don't have any issue typing all the accents in French on a qwerty keyboard. It's no harder than using proper capitalization. When I made the switch, it was when I was doing a lot of Perl and I found the French keyboard was easier on the hands than the US one, as the sigils & most operators didn't require any modifier key to be typed—though brackets were another story.
- rodelrod 11y ago
  My (slightly customized) Portuguese layout gives me both every accent you need in French and easily accessible braces. The French AZERTY with the inverted number row may be too screwed up for any hope of rescue, though ;)
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
bryanlarsen 11y ago
These regular changes are one of the most awesome things about French. As the language changes, as all living languages do over time, they change the spelling to match actual usage. Show me a random French word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to pronounce it, or at least how the Parisians pronounce it. Compare that with the abomination that is English spelling.
- pif 11y ago
  > they change the spelling to match actual usage Unfortunately, as already said, they are not changing it: they are adding an alternative. > Show me a random French word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to pronounce it Three villages in "Pays de Gex": Ornex: final "x" is not pronounced, like in standard French. Challex: final "x" is pronounced. Moëns: "oë" is pronounced like "wa" in "thwart", as if the dieresis wasn't there. Btw, tell me a random Italian word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to write it. Now that's nice, never having to ask: "What's your surname? How do spell it? Where are you from? How do you spell it?".
grownseed 11y ago
Sort of tangential, my family is French and I regularly get in touch with them by email. I haven't touched a French keyboard in a long time, so I actually used to know all the ctrl+# combinations for special (i.e. non ASCII 65-90) French characters. I got lazy, it was too cumbersome, so I ended up dropping accents altogether (to the horror of my classical French teacher dad). My emails are completely understandable, but some edge cases can sometimes make it a little bit difficult. Ironically though, while I don't type them, I'm very aware of the accents, and this decision to drop the circumflex rubs me the wrong way, particularly since I've been taught to always be aware of the roots of words (thank you, Dad). As an aside to this tangent, my family name contains a "ë", "e" with a "tréma", an accent which is used in only a handful of words. Upon moving away from France, the administration I was dealing with tried to input my name in their system, which it broke (reminded of https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/ here). Since then, I've dropped the accent from my name entirely, which has arguably made things easier in foreign countries. The main issue with dropping the accent is that my name now translates to "toy", and while the pronunciation of my name is the same as the object nowadays, it didn't use to, so dropping the accent means losing a bit of history (including meaning). On the other hand, I noticed that authorities don't care about the accent, at all, not even French ones. My various IDs switched from the version with an accent to the one without, and absolutely nobody picked up on it.

48 points by Perados 11y ago

> it suggested to remove the circumflex from above the letters ‘i’ and ‘u’ where the accent does not change the pronunciation nor the meaning of the word, as in ‘paraître’ (to appear) or ‘coût’ (cost). Looks like it's a functional change. I'm a spanish speaker, and would hate to see all the accents go, because they indicate how a word must be pronounced. But we too, have cases which don't indicate anything, and I'd like to see these equally gone.

jhanschoo 11y ago
To be fair, I don't remember that the circumflex should signify a change in pronunciation in standard French.
- elros 11y ago
  Nowadays it's mostly only the case on the letter <e>, where it indicates a pronunciation of /ɛ/. In the past, when put on a <a> it changed it from /a/ to /ɑ/, however that mostly fell in disuse in most French French dialects and I can only hear the distinction consistently in Canadian French dialects.
- pascalmahe 11y ago
  That's the thing, this specific reform only removes the accent when it doesn't have any impact. It's really about cleaning up inconstencies and weird edge cases.
- talideon 11y ago
  Once upon a time, it did and in some varieties still does: its origin was in a lost /s/ (later other deleted consonants too, IIRC), which lead to compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. You can still see this in some varieties of French, such as Belgian and Swiss French, which preserve the old long vowels somewhat better than metropolitan French.

zdkl 11y ago

My name is spelled with an accent circonflexe, imagine my reaction when I learned this :) To further the griping frenchman's cliché, good luck getting me to drop it; The sentimental value, the culture, merde!

eloisant 11y ago
The accent circonflexe is not going anywhere. They're only dropping it from some words on "u" or "i" where it doesn't bring anything, either for prononciation or to distinguish from a different word. So it will disappear from "coût" and "paraître" but not from "jeûne" (because "jeune" has a different meaning). It's staying to "e" and "a" (être for example). Too many people read headlines, not articles. The rumor that the accent circonflexe will be gone completely has spread up because people are too lazy checking the source and just dumbly repeat what they hear.
- zdkl 11y ago
  Oh I did read the article, and I understand that this is aimed to encourage dual-use, rather than excluding one or the other. I was merely expressing myself in favour of continuing to use it, even though their omission is not an error anymore. If they really wanted to simplify things they'd be better served looking into rules about the place of the COD and 'avoir'... I have traumatic memories from primary school french lessons ;) (Also, while I agree with it's spirit, I resent the hostility about your misunderstanding of my post)
- thiht 11y ago
  What's funny about that is that most people complaining about the accent circonflexe disappearing already don't use it where it's supposed to be used. They already apply most of the 1990 reform they complain about without knowing it.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    What evidence do you have that the people that complain about the reform are the same that unconsciously leave away the accent circonflexe? I rather think these two groups are rather disjoint.

pif 11y ago

As an Italian living in France, I've noticed a pattern: several times, a circumflex in French corresponds to an "S" lost from its Latin origin. Examples: FR "coût" - EN "cost" - IT "costo" - LAT "constare" FR "crêpe" - EN "crêpe" - IT "crespella" - LAT "crispus" FR "tôt" - EN "soon" - IT "tosto" - LAT "tostus" FR "château" - EN "castle" - IT "castello" - LAT "castellum"

carlob 11y ago
(As an Italian who has lived in France, but is now fortunately back to our sunny shores ;) ). I'm pretty sure it's something most people are taught in school when learning French. Notice that it's not just S. For example mûr is mature, so it's a whole syllable there. There is a whole discipline called phonétique historique and all future high school French teacher have to learn it (at least the ones that pass the Agrégation), which basically tells the story of how words have transformed from their Latin to their French pronunciation. Unfortunately the approach that is taught is not rigorously scientific and you get to learn just a bunch of rules of thumb.
- pif 11y ago
  > most people are taught in school when learning French You probably mean: when learning French _in Italy_. If you learn it in France, there is usually no comparison with Italian or Latin, so this specific pattern is just lost.
  - carlob 11y ago
    Yes, I meant as a foreign romance language of course. My point was that it's funny that you've discovered it independently.
  - bambax 11y ago
    I don't know what the parent meant, but I can assure you that in France you're (usually) taught that the ^ stands for a lost letter -- it's what helps remember where to put the accent.

elcapitan 11y ago

As the article mentions, Germany had a big battle around such changes 20 years ago. It has settled down since. Some things in language are pretty arbitrary, and if it's a sufficiently small group of changes, it's probably no big deal to make that change. Matters would be totally different for English I guess ;) In general I would oppose changes to the language by committee, in particular politically motivated ones, but this seems to be fairly uncontroversial (only that it defies tradition, but "natural" changes in language do so too).

wolfgke 11y ago
The problem in the new German spelling was rather that lots of things simply did not make sense. For example: "Gemse" (old spelling, which is also how you speak it) vs. "Gämse" (new spelling that was "intended" to be derived from "Gams". Unluckily "Gams" is a dialect word, while "Gemse" is the original German one). Or an IMHO even more drastic example "aufwendig" (old spelling; also how you speak it) vs. "aufwändig" (new spelling). The official reason is that aufwendig/aufwändig is derived from the noun "Aufwand". But you can also give good reasons why it makes sense to derive it from the verb "aufwenden". No person could explain me the reason why the noun was chosen over the verb. So yes, I am open to a sane spelling reform. But the one that was implemented in Germany clearly wasn't. If you want to do a spelling reform for the deep impact it will have, it must be (nearly) perfect - an analog in software engineering is "lots of nines of availability". If you are not able to reach this gold standard you better leave it.
- elcapitan 11y ago
  I agree, they should have changed the verb "aufwenden" to "aufwänden", to make it completely consistent: "Aufwand"-"aufwänden"-"aufwändig". Other than that, I didn't mean to take that as an example of a great implementation. It's just that it happened and it didn't cause too many deaths, from what I remember.
  - wolfgke 11y ago
    > I agree, they should have changed the verb "aufwenden" to "aufwänden", to make it completely consistent But then you also have to change "wenden" -> "wänden" and "abwenden" zu "abwänden". If we conjugate this, we get "ich wände mich ab" (1st person singular). But unluckily "ich wände mich ab" is already the Conjunctive II of "abwenden" (also 1st person singular). So the consequences of changing the the spelling of "aufwenden" are much deeper than it looks on the first view. My answer is rather to find an abstract, but completely general rule from which words adjectives are to be derived: the noun or the verb.

bambax 11y ago

This whole affair is the symptom of a deeper tragedy, that of the French "orthographe" (meaning "proper spelling"). Orthographe is a rather recent notion, that appeared well after the creation of the Académie française (1635), I would say somewhere in the middle of the 18th century, and then became the universal enforceable "norm" that it is today, in the middle of the following century (19th). Before that, you could spell French any which way you liked; most authors spelled the same word differently, not just in different works, but in the same page, and not depending on context either. And it wasn't a problem, because it can be argued that the best works of French literature were written at a time when orthographe didn't exist. There were "grammarians" that insisted that there should be some rules and that they should be followed, but they were objects of universal scorn and mockery. Then, I'm not sure exactly how, grammarians won, and now we have orthographe. Orthographe is a tragedy for two reasons: - it's mainly, or uniquely, a social marker - it's so complex and so arbitrary, it takes between 5 and 10 years of arduous study to learn. And after people learn it, they become attached to it, it becomes part of their identity, and it continues to be enforced and imposed on children as a matter of course, without any objection from anybody. For the record, I'm a very good (or by most metrics, excellent) French speller, but I'm also a parent and am heartbroken to see my kids spend the best part of their young lives learning this thing that has absolutely no extrinsic or intrinsic value whatsoever. They could learn music, or drawing, or cooking, or woodworking, or go play outdoors, but there's no time, because orthographe is so damn hard it takes all of the time in school, and more time at home. Hard and useless. The worst part is it's not a fight you can fight on your own -- decide that your kids won't learn orthographe after all -- because that would cause them a huge disservice: the social marker part means that those who can't spell are excluded from normal society and have a very hard time finding jobs (any job). Many social problems in French society -- including, I really think so, recent outbursts of "terrorism" -- have at least some roots in the actual terror and tragedy of orthographe. If you can't learn orthographe you can't be a member of French society, and in order to learn orthographe you have to already be a member of said society. Do I like the current reform? No, I think it's stupid and counter-productive, because it adds an alternative spelling to 2000 or so words; the alternative spelling may be simpler, but the addition raises complexity instead of lowering it. -- The point is to get rid of orthographe, not double it.

11y ago

legulere 11y ago

It's pretty silly how people get outraged about the smallest changes in the writing system. In Germany the last real changes were made over 100 years ago (removal of C, Th, etc.). There are so many things where there's no justification to do it the way it's done now. That we write a few words with v instead of f helps nobody. The tons of ways we mark long vocals only confuse. S only being pronounced sh in front of p and t is pretty arbitrary, you use the rule for all consonants and become more similar to the other Germanic languages (e.g. Schweden -> Sweden, schmelzen -> smelzen). You could write ts instead of z, because that's how we actually pronounce it and it would be easier to understand for speakers of other germanic languages (smeltsen). But no that would be seen as the downfall of our culture or something.

gpvos 11y ago
You are almost proposing to adopt Dutch spelling. :)
- legulere 11y ago
  I'm actually more influenced by Swedish spelling, where I saw how nice things could be. Separating ij and ei (which were long i and ai in protogermanic) seems pretty cool to me as it makes it more obvious for other germanic languages what the corresponding word is (drijven seems more similar to drive than to treiben), however I guess it's really hard for people to remember which of the two is the correct one for each word when they're pronounced the same.
  - gpvos 11y ago
    I don't know enough about Swedish spelling, but there seem to be quite some irregularities such as the g sometimes being pronounced as j, and o sometimes as u, but there is probably some rule to those. As you show, Dutch has its share of weirdness too, of course.
wolfgke 11y ago
Being German, I find the idea interesting, though not without flaws. There will have to be lots of exceptions to your proposed rule (s before consonant is spoken "sch"), where the s has to be spoken "as usual": "sk": Skelett (skeleton) or Skunk (skunk) "sl": Slowenien, Slowakei (slovenia, slovakia) "sm": Smaragd (emerald), Smegma

gulpahum 11y ago

The French are going to get a new standardized keyboard, partly to protect the language. [1] Would dropping circumflexes help creating a simpler keyboard? [1] http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change-keyboard-layout-azerty http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change-key...

pascalmahe 11y ago
No: the accent is only dropped when it doesn't affect pronunciation. When it's used to differentiate between two words, otherwise spelled the same, it stays. And the reform was deigned 25 years ago, so there is no link between it and the desire to create a simpler keybord.

mcv 11y ago

I hate these kind of imposed spelling reforms. I'd much rather let language evolve naturally. Dutch has also had a very controversial spelling reform in the 1990s, which changed some very logical spelling rules into very arbitrary ones. I still resist, but I seem to be the only one. Pannekoek!

jordigh 11y ago
> I'd much rather let language evolve naturally. Spelling isn't natural though, as there are many humans without writing but practically none without language. Writing has always been at the whims of standardisation, whether "officially" so like the French Academy or Sejong did for French and Hangul, or just by convention like Webster did for American English, simplifying the spelling that Oxford had previously promoted.
m_t 11y ago
> imposed spelling reforms It is not imposed at all. It is a recommendation that was set in 1990, and accept both writing of the words. Why is it coming back in the news? That's a pretty complex question.
- pif 11y ago
  Because, starting in September 2016, the new ortographe will be taught at school.

buserror 11y ago

As a french programmer, since I'm about 12, and expatriate for about 20 years, I learned long ago that: 1) I needed a qwerty keyboard do I don't develop RSI trying to type braces on a french one. 2) I also decided that getting RSI trying to type the accents on a qwerty keyboard was silly. I thus type french without any accents at all. Sometime the result is funny :-)

athenot 11y ago
Similar situation here but I don't have any issue typing all the accents in French on a qwerty keyboard. It's no harder than using proper capitalization. When I made the switch, it was when I was doing a lot of Perl and I found the French keyboard was easier on the hands than the US one, as the sigils & most operators didn't require any modifier key to be typed—though brackets were another story.
rodelrod 11y ago
My (slightly customized) Portuguese layout gives me both every accent you need in French and easily accessible braces. The French AZERTY with the inverted number row may be too screwed up for any hope of rescue, though ;)

deleted 11y ago

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bryanlarsen 11y ago

These regular changes are one of the most awesome things about French. As the language changes, as all living languages do over time, they change the spelling to match actual usage. Show me a random French word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to pronounce it, or at least how the Parisians pronounce it. Compare that with the abomination that is English spelling.

pif 11y ago
> they change the spelling to match actual usage Unfortunately, as already said, they are not changing it: they are adding an alternative. > Show me a random French word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to pronounce it Three villages in "Pays de Gex": Ornex: final "x" is not pronounced, like in standard French. Challex: final "x" is pronounced. Moëns: "oë" is pronounced like "wa" in "thwart", as if the dieresis wasn't there. Btw, tell me a random Italian word and I may not know what it means, but I do know how to write it. Now that's nice, never having to ask: "What's your surname? How do spell it? Where are you from? How do you spell it?".

grownseed 11y ago

Sort of tangential, my family is French and I regularly get in touch with them by email. I haven't touched a French keyboard in a long time, so I actually used to know all the ctrl+# combinations for special (i.e. non ASCII 65-90) French characters. I got lazy, it was too cumbersome, so I ended up dropping accents altogether (to the horror of my classical French teacher dad). My emails are completely understandable, but some edge cases can sometimes make it a little bit difficult. Ironically though, while I don't type them, I'm very aware of the accents, and this decision to drop the circumflex rubs me the wrong way, particularly since I've been taught to always be aware of the roots of words (thank you, Dad). As an aside to this tangent, my family name contains a "ë", "e" with a "tréma", an accent which is used in only a handful of words. Upon moving away from France, the administration I was dealing with tried to input my name in their system, which it broke (reminded of https://xkcd.com/327/ https://xkcd.com/327/ here). Since then, I've dropped the accent from my name entirely, which has arguably made things easier in foreign countries. The main issue with dropping the accent is that my name now translates to "toy", and while the pronunciation of my name is the same as the object nowadays, it didn't use to, so dropping the accent means losing a bit of history (including meaning). On the other hand, I noticed that authorities don't care about the accent, at all, not even French ones. My various IDs switched from the version with an accent to the one without, and absolutely nobody picked up on it.