Having worked as a French teacher in the US, I
was forced not only to learn French grammar but also reflect on how to explain
it and make it understandable to English speakers. I can confidently say that
one of the hardest parts of learning French, for beginners anyway, is learning
French spelling particularly because of all of the silent letters. However,
I was surprised to find after living in France that the French themselves have
problems spelling.
Whereas certain languages such as Spanish and
Italian are phonetic, meaning words are spelled as they sound, for French this is
not the case. English is also particularly difficult for
spelling, and like French, is also not a phonetic language. Think about it, why
are the pronunciations of ‘enough’ ‘through’ and ‘though’ all different? This
is very difficult for people learning English. School spelling bees are a great
example of a way we have tried to make an activity out of learning English
spelling.
To specify the particular difficulties of French
spelling, I’m not talking simply about the equivalent to our sayings like ‘i
before e except after c’ or other rhymes to help us remember the order of
letters. French spelling is difficult because it reveals, quite simply, if the
person writing knows the rules of French grammar or not. Think of it as the
difference between writing ‘they’re’ ‘their’ or ‘there’ or writing ‘its’
instead of ‘it’s’. These are the types of spelling traps that French is full
of, and as I said, the French are just as prone as non-native speakers to
making these mistakes. To prove my point, I took a picture of a handwritten
note left on the lockers of the gym I belong to, reminding gym-users to remove
their locks from the lockers.
The same type of spelling error is repeated twice in this note, the word casser (to break) is in the infinitive
form, and should be in the adjective form cassé
(broken). The same goes for the word retirer
(to remove) which should be retiré
(removed). A French person would make this kind of mistake for the same reason
that an English speaker could make a mistake between ‘their’ and ‘they’re’,
that is, the pronunciation of casser and
cassé in French is exactly the same.
What’s the point of looking at this kind of error ? It
demonstates not only the difficulty of French spelling (this is a pretty tame
example, but I’ll give a more difficult one later), but also shows that
understanding French grammar is very important to be able to write in French,
for both native and non-native speakers. The French learn their language and
its grammar rigorously in school. Obviously, not everyone learns it well
but people simply would not be able to write grammatically correct French if
they didn’t learn the grammar of their language. English is much more forgiving
in this sense and, in my opinion, requires less explicit grammar study in order
to write.
To give a more complex but still very common example, I will
approach the domain of direct and indirect object pronouns. This was one of the
hardest things to teach to English-speaking students, and if you search
‘direct’ and ‘indirect object’ in French, you will come across many French
people asking the same questions on internet forums. Two example sentences to
illustrate my point :
Ma sœur s’appelle
Jane. (My sister’s name is Jane.)
Correct : Je l’ai
vue
la semaine dernière. (I saw her last week)
Incorrect : Je
l’ai vu la semaine dernière. (I saw her last week)
In French, when you have a direct object pronoun that
precedes a verb in past tense (passé composé) you must make agreement between
the object and the verb. In other words, when you have a feminine pronoun (a
word like she) you have to mark the verb in your sentence with an ‘e’. The
difficulty, again is that the pronunciation between the correct and incorrect
sentence is exactly the same. When children learn French growing up they can’t hear these distinctions in grammar, and
so they wouldn’t naturally write them. They learn them through grammar lessons
and writing practice.
As I mentioned earlier, writing correctly
the sentence above involves solid knowledge of French grammatical rules. The writer has to identify an object pronoun as direct or
indirect, remember that you make agreement only in certain tenses, and only
when the pronoun is before the verb.
Pretty complicated stuff.
Incidentally, a book I read this summer about the history of
French (called quite simply The Story of
French) talks about this almost ridiculous complexity between French
grammar and spelling, which generally is only visible in writing. The authors
of the book point out that many languages, English in particular, will often
accept grammatical errors as the ‘norm’ when they become commonly used (such as
the loss of the relative pronoun ‘whom’ in English). When the majority of
the population misuses certain words or ignores certain grammatical rules, it
can become generally accepted to no longer observe those rules in writing.
This type of transformation would make sense in French.
Perhaps not for the locker example, but certainly for the direct object pronoun
example, where the presence or absence of an ‘e’ is only apparent in writing.
But according to the authors of this book the French do not even broach the
subject of such changes in writing, for fear of appearing "ignorant or
illiterate". This is also probably heightened by the fact that written
French is clearly in a higher register than spoken French (whereas in American
English, we tend to write as we speak).
It’s true that France is a very hierarchical society, and
the French language is a key element in upholding this hierarchy. Changing what
seems like superfluous grammar to me probably also indicates my underlying
American ‘pragmatism’ and the fairly fluid use and modifications we accept in
American English. In other words, I suppose I’m approaching a very French issue
with a very American perspective.
So rather than waiting for the French to revise their
spelling rules, my time will probably be better spent reviewing some of those
tricky grammar points on internet forums.
Quotation : Jean-Benoît Nadeau, Julie Barlow, The Story of French. St. Martin’s
Press : New York, 2006, p. 374.
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