Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 69.djvu/543

THE SIMPLIFICATION OF FRENCH SPELLING

By Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

IN February, 1903, the French government appointed a commission to prepare the simplification of French orthography. It consisted of MM. Bernès, Clairin, Comte, Croiset, Devinat, Gréard, Meyer (members of the Superior Council of Education), M. Havet (of the institute), Professors Brunot and Thomas (of the University of Paris), and MM. Carnaud and Cornet (deputies). M. Paul Meyer was the president of the commission and M. Clairin the secretary. The commission made its report in July, 1904, advocating a series of simplifications of French spelling, in accordance with the principle of omitting useless silent letters—the same principle which is guiding the action of the Simplified Spelling Board here in the United States.

The report of this commission was submitted to the French Academy, which charged M. Emile Faguet with the duty of expressing its opinions. As a result the government appointed a second commission, of which M. Faguet is a member and of which the report was written by Professor Brunot. This report is in type, but it has not yet been distributed. M. Meyer has now reprinted his report, prefacing it with a personal paper of his own in which he discusses the present condition of French orthography, explains the historic reasons for its absurdities and points out how it can most easily be improved. His pamphlet, 'Pour la Simplification de notre Orthographe,' is published in Paris, by Delagrave. His statement of the case is curiously like that which has been made in English by the Simplified Spelling Board.

Ordinarily, spelling is defined as 'the art and science of writing the words of a language correctly, according to established usage.' But that usage becomes established under conditions differing widely, according to the period and the country; and in order to appreciate the value of the orthography of any language it is important in the first place to know the origin of that usage, made permanent in the spelling. Almost everywhere the original idea was that spelling should reflect pronunciation as closely as possible; the phonetic tendency is predominant. But wherever spelling became fixed at an early time, whether by academies or through printers' influence, it ceased gradually to be phonetic in character, because language changed, little by little, in pronunciation as well as in vocabulary and grammar, whereas spelling, once established, paid no attention to these changes. Other causes entered into play which helped gradually to take from the spelling of certain languages the symbol of graphic representation of sounds they originally possessed. One of these causes, and perhaps the most potent, was the pedantry which introduced into the writing of many words so-called etymological letters which were not pronounced. These contradictory tendencies may be seen elsewhere as well as in French. Thus, to cite a single example, English spelling, which was principally phonetic in the sixteenth century, has now become purely conventional, the pronuncia-