SIMPLIFICATION OF FRENCH SPELLING 539 



THE SIMPLIFICATION OF FRENCH SPELLING 



By Professor BRANDER MATTHEWS 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



TN February, 1903, the French government appointed a commission 

 -*- to prepare the simplification of French orthography. It con- 

 sisted of MM. Bernes, Clairin, Comte, Croiset, Devinat, Greard, 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 com- 

 mission made its report in July, 1904, advocating a series of simplifica- 

 tions 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 Acad- 

 emy, 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 con- 

 dition 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 aa ' the art and science of writing the words 

 of a language correctly, according to established usage.' But that usage be- 

 comes 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 tend- 

 ency 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 pronuncia- 

 tion 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- 



