Ognons that will bring tears to my eyes
Dumbing down the French language will create a whole generation of illiterate undergraduates
I’m rarely in sympathy with the hashtagged wisdom of the internet, but I’ll make an exception over the #JeSuisCirconflexe fury. The French Ministry of Education has decided to enforce an Académie Française decision dating back to 1990 to “simplify” the French language by changing some 2,400 words.
What fresh hell is this? Gone are the circumflex hats over words such as maîtresse (mistress), hôte (host), coût
(cost), vêtements (vestments) – the accents were inherited from the Latin “s”, which vanished from French but is still present in English. An “oignon”, meanwhile, will henceforth be spelled “ognon” because, we are told, the i is redundant: the new word will be simpler for schoolchildren to learn. Verb tense rules are to be “relaxed” along with many logical grammatical rules. “Adults”, the official decree loftily allows, “can still use the old spellings”; but the young will now be taught in manuals using this terrifying esperanto of unsurpassed ugliness.
It is no surprise that what was a speculative discussion a quarter of a century ago among 40 rather civilised, snobbish and reliably silly old men has been made into a sharp edict under the most ideological education minister France has known since the early Eighties, Najat VallaudBelkacem. She has vowed to destroy any trace of “elitism” from the French school system.
This dumbing down of the French language is supposed, after many other similarly “inclusive” reforms, to help pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds obtain the degrees the Ministry has set targets for and find jobs. The result, of course, is near illiteracy among undergraduates of all but the most prestigious French universities.
You don’t need to be George Orwell to see that there is something sinister in any regime that sacrifices the memory and structure of the language to convenience and political fiat. When the Bolsheviks came to power, one of their first edicts was to do away with several letters of the old Russian alphabet, even though that, in effect, changed the pronunciation of many words: my own Russian grandmother, half a century after the fact, still bitterly rued the disappearance of the chtch every time she came across one in her preRevolutionary edition of Lermontov.
Mustapha Kemal Atatürk did away with the Arabic alphabet of Turkey during his 1922 secular revolution, neatly cutting off the young Turks from most Islamic texts or Ottoman histories. Before him, the Jesuit Alexander of Rhodes pulled the same trick when he created the Vietnamese Latinate alphabet in 1651, replacing the ideograms the Vietnamese borrowed from the Chinese.
And you don’t need to be Sigmund Freud to know that your language structures your thoughts: the speculative nature of Russian mathematics is linked to Slavonic complexity as much as French Cartesianism belongs to a language that can create beauty and logic out of comparatively few words (Racine only uses 800 of them) and grammatical structures inherited and refined from Latin. English creates Shakespeare as much as Shakespeare creates English, an empirical language built word by word rather than according to abstract constructs.
Tinkering with such a longdeveloping organic structure for the sake of facility is not just stupid: it is ugly, actively evil. I’ll vote for whichever presidential candidate next year will promise to reverse the Vallaud-Belkacem decree. In the meantime, they’ll pry the last circumflex from my cold, dead hands.