The circumflex: a battle over an accent mark | Hacker News Reader

The circumflex: a battle over an accent mark

bbc.com

48 pointsPerados59 comments

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"

(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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I can assure you of the opposite. It has never been said to me once. I guessed it by correlating roots (foret - forestier). And globally phonetic or linguistic derivation from history was never mentioned (even in latin classes, we were taught translation but they never told about phonetic shifts).

ps: I often cringed at the lack of reasoning in language studies here, I'm happy that I may be just unlucky and that you got proper information from your teachers.

My teachers did teach us about where the circumflex was coming from (most of the time, a lost s).

I'm a Frenchman who grew up in France.

And I thought I attended above average schools. Fail.

Correct, this is something you learn in elementary school. :)

Yes, I meant as a foreign romance language of course. My point was that it's funny that you've discovered it independently.

I was told in school back in France that they were dating back to the copists monks. Basically they were making the same mistake over and over and the accent was the correction of the omission on the top.

That's what helped me learn French in school. I had no idea whether "fenetre" was male or female and whether it had an accent, until I remembered "fenestra".

Didn't help, though. I dropped it as soon as I could (and I dropped Latin a year earlier).

> 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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)

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.

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.

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.

Resistance is unnecessary, names and adjective derived from them keep their accent circonflexe.

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!

> 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.

> 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.

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

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 :-)

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.

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 ;)

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/ 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.

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.

> 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?".

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.

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.

> 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).

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 !)

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

Those are foreign loanwords, the same exists with St- and Sp-:

Spa, Spin, Sputnik, Steak, Stigma, Stewardess

You will always end up with some exceptions if you don't write fully phonetically, which isn't possible because there are differences in pronunciation.

p.s.: schk doesn't really exist as sk shifted to sch (which is why the reason we write sch): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift#.2...

One important thing about writing 'z' rather than 'ts' is that is makes it more obvious that it's the affricate 'ts' rather 't' followed by 's', which can seem like a subtle difference on the face of it, but it's important for knowing where the syllable break is.

I agree with you. Still, I think it's unfortunate that the same character is used for two different sounds. I'm having a hard time with my French colleagues saying "pidsa" instead of "pittsa" :-)

You are almost proposing to adopt Dutch spelling. :)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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).

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

There is some truth about orthographe being a social marker, or a metric for intelligence (whatever intelligence means). But simply removing orthographe would not remove the social signalling, it would only shift it to something else absolutely random, but that shows you had some education, etc.

Consistent and straightforward orthography is the solution rather than the cause of spelling being used as a social marker.

English has no academic body enforcing standards and is a pretty anarchic language, and yet learning to spell and decipher spellings is still something which every native speaker of English spends years learning (even to the extent of national competitions!). Spanish does have an academic body regulating the language and yet the much more consistent Spanish orthography is too straightforward to waste much time learning (and the pronunciation of unfamiliar words is pretty straightforward as well)

If the Académie française didn't exist, privately published dictionaries and educational curricula would become the new de facto norm, as in English. If they differed widely in spellings, then consistently following the appropriate one for a particular context would be even more of a social marker.

If I understand correctly, you are against having one rule for writing French and you'd prefer some anarchy in spelling. Personally, I don't agree with you: serious documents need to be written in a language which provides an official grammar.

> Orthographe is a tragedy for two reasons:

The current ortographe is a tragedy, but they could have chosen a simpler and more logical one. In particular, they could have avoided keeping in written all those details that have been lost in speaking (ex: "(je) faisais", "(il) faisait", "(ils) faisaient"): why not just writing the same if you pronounce the same?

OTOH, I fully agree with you that the result of adding a tolerated alternative, instead of forcing a change, doesn't even look like a simplification.

I'm not against having a rule; I think the current set of "rules" (really, a collection of historical accidents that have no consistency and no fundamental "meaning") are not worth the time needed to learn them.

I wish orthographe never happened.

I don't have a solution for where we are now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com