In my last video, I talked about spelling reforms, specifically
the 1996/2006 German spelling reform, and my own proposed reform for English orthography.
But here's a fun fact!
French had a spelling reform too!
After about 26 years of back and forth between opinion havers... but French this
time... and different stages of introducing it in various institutions and instances...
It was announced in 2016, in France,
that this spelling reform would apply in education from the following year,
which, let's be honest, is the only real way to properly introduce a spelling reform.
This caused nothing short of outrage.
One of the words that was changed was "oignon", which means "onion".
The old spelling of "oignon" is this.
This is an objectively awful way to spell this word.
The "gn" digraph is a palatal nasal, a /ɲ/ sound like in the Spanish "ñ".
This "on"... that's a nasal open mid back rounded vowel... an /ɔ̃/ sound.
But this "oi" at the beginning of the word... why?!
In other words, like "oiseau", "oisif" or
"je sois", this combination of letters makes a /wa/ sound.
So this, to me, says /wa.ɲɔ̃/.
But it's not pronounced like that.
So the 1990s spelling reform... the one that took 26 years to get into schools... proposed,
very sensibly, to get rid of that extra "i" in the spelling.
So now, it's spelt like this ("ognon").
Wow, will you look at that?
Now it actually looks like how it's pronounced.
But people were NOT happy. There were highly respected journalists
complaining that this was not a rectification, but a simplification!
...as if... that's some... bad thing...
People spread Facebook posts about how the French language would be spelt like THIS
if "they" were allowed to get away with it!
Linguists were panicking, coming up with some half-baked excuses about the
"i being necessary to soften the gn" so it wasn't /gn/...
Conveniently forgetting about words like "besogne" and "montagne".
People took to Twitter with the hashtag "#jesuiscirconflexe",
referencing another change made by the spelling reform...
To get rid of... and I can't stress this enough... the completely MEANINGLESS diacritic,
the circumflex, or "circonflexe" in French,
from words without minimal pairs distinguished by it.
Far-right politician Florian Philippot even Tweeted that they were faced with an infamous and
stupid reform... and they had to defend the French language... because "le français est notre âme"...
"The French language is our soul".
Very much like this Facebook post which dramatically exclaims that
"when a people no longer dares to defend its language, it's ripe for...
...slavery"? Because no "i" in "ognon"?
Also that's not how you spell Remy.
"Ognon" doesn't even look like a vegetable...
it looks like... "o... non!" exclaimed another warrior for the great French culture.
Who would order a "soupe d'ognon" with no "i"?
Even though the old spellings are still seen as completely valid...
It's easy to point and laugh at these French people complaining
about an "i" disappearing from "ognon"...
But it's important to remember that there's always going to be opposition to change,
no matter how logical or small...
or how well it complies with the four rules that I
personally laid out in my last video for spelling reforms...
There were people getting very mad about the German spelling reform as well,
and there would definitely be thousands of people
getting ready to defend the heritage of the most wonderful English culture,
if we added an extra "p" to the word "developing".
But the broader problem here isn't with that "i" disappearing in "ognon"
or some eszetts being replaced with "double-s"s.
Of course, that gut reaction to something you've
known your whole life suddenly changing, can be a strong one.
But there's a wider argument here against... prescriptivism.
Prescriptivism is when opinion havers decide how a language should be spoken and written,
rather than simply describing how it IS spoken and written.
And some people think that a big organisation like the Académie Française, or the government,
telling people how to spell their words is fundamentally wrong.
But guess what, you hate prescriptivism?
Saying that we can't prescribe new spellings... is a prescription.
It's not like everyone's made the collective
free decision to spell "ognon" in this ridiculous, irregular way.
It's been taught!
School children who have forgotten that "i"
or forgotten random silent hats on vowels have been told... "tu as tort" ("you're wrong").
Making the decision to not prescribe new spellings,
when it comes to a large language used for education like French or German or English...
is the same thing as prescribing the old spellings!
So please, stop being a bunch of elitist prescriptivists, and let all the children
in France, me, and everyone else trying to learn your ridiculous orthography...
spell "ognon" without an "i".