
The circumflex: a battle over an accent mark - Perados
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20160215-the-circumflex-a-battle-over-an-accent-mark
======
pif
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
(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
> 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.

~~~
bambax
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.

~~~
pif
Well, I meant: when you learn French in France _as a stranger_, they don't
talk about the history of the language, thus the concept of a lost letter
doesn't stand.

~~~
gpvos
Such courses tend to be very utilitarian, and not go into a language's history
much. Although I guess it might actually be helpful to know while learning
French as an Italian.

------
hobarrera
> 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
To be fair, I don't remember that the circumflex should signify a change in
pronunciation in standard French.

~~~
elros
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.

------
zdkl
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
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.

~~~
thiht
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
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.

~~~
thiht
Empirical evidence. Most people complaining about the "new reform" don't even
know it's been around for ~25 years nor what it's really about. Try to ask
someone who complained about this reform to write some words like "maitre" or
"paraitre", I can almost guarantee you they won't use the circonflexe.

------
mcv
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!

~~~
m_t
> 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
Because, starting in September 2016, the new ortographe will be taught at
school.

------
buserror
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
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.

------
grownseed
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.

------
bryanlarsen
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
> 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?".

------
legulere
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.

~~~
Gmo
What about the reform of the ß and the triple s ?

I have to say that for me as a foreigner with a not-so-good level of German
(but who need to use it regularly), that reform was really confusing.

I mean, the triple s, I understand, but the ß, it was hard to know when to put
one before, but I find it even harder now ! Also because there are a bunch of
words I learned which changed orthography.

To be fair, I never learned the exact reasoning of the new reform, but I would
have found more logical to just get rid of it altogether.

~~~
wolfgke
> I mean, the triple s, I understand, but the ß, it was hard to know when to
> put one before, but I find it even harder now

What do you mean with triple s? Triple consonants only occur (and only in the
new spelling) if you concatenate a word that ends with two of the consonants
with one that begins with the same, as Fluss[-]strecke or Schiff[-]fahrt. Very
easy in my opinion.

Much more interesting is the question when to use ss vs ß. Here the new
spelling is in my opinion more logical: If the vowel before the ß was short in
the old spelling (such as Kuß (kiss)), it is replaced by ss in the new
spelling (Kuss). If, on the other hand, in the old spelling the vowel before ß
is long (as in Straße (road)), the ß is also used in the new spelling.

So the only remaining question is when to use single s vs. ß in words. Here I
openly don't know the exact rules (but people told me there are).

~~~
Gmo
Yes, that's what I meant with the triple s, and I do agree it's logical (if
you read carefully that's what I was saying, but apparently, it was not clear
enough).

As for the ß, I didn't know the exact new rule. At least, there is some logic
to it. Now, for a Frenchman, it's not always easy to know when the vowel is
short and when it's long, so that's the difficult part ;) (for instance, I
would not have thought the a in Straße is long !)

------
gulpahum
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-
key...](http://www.theverge.com/2016/1/21/10805562/france-change-keyboard-
layout-azerty)

~~~
pascalmahe
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.

------
elcapitan
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
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
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
> 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
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.

~~~
Mikushi
What are you on about...

>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

How can you say this seriously. Not only orthographe is extremely important to
the health of the language itself but also to its health abroad. How can you
teach the language to someone if while reading two texts you encounter about
10 different ways of spelling the same word.

And contrary to you I speak as a fairly horrible French speller (mostly due to
my own lack of attention in class and the fact that English is my first
language for over a decade now).

> 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.

They have, and I really think so, roots in people like you pointing the
fingers anywhere but where the problems are. Seriously, orthographe as a
factor in terrorism, jesus fucking christ what the fuck.

~~~
bambax
I'm not sure what the "health" of a language is; the power/influence of a
language, however, is a direct factor of the power/influence of its main
speakers, and doesn't have anything to do with spelling. English is the world
language because of the US economy; when French was the language of reference,
orthographe hadn't happened yet.

Regarding terrorism: current French "terrorists" are misfits; and I use quotes
not because their acts aren't despicable or horrible, but because their main
purpose isn't to terrorise (in order to obtain something by way of fear). It's
to exact vengeance (as you'll learn if you watch their videos, they say as
much). They are not in pursuit of any kind of political gain; they want to
inflict pain and nothing else.

Orthographe, in my (controversial) view, is not a cause and probably not even
a factor, but really a symptom of how French society works; and the way it
works is, it upsets everyone except the very elite.

