Free The Story of French by Jean-Benoit Nadeau, Julie Barlow

historic forms of the words), a trend that dates back to the twelfth century in the case of French. In some cases spellings conform to sounds; in others, they reflect the history of the word. This explains why, as writer Bill Bryson points out in The Mother Tongue, there are fourteen ways to write the sound sh in English. Phonetically, sure and attention would be spelled shur and aten-shun, but English speakers like to see the history of the word in its spelling. This is why French spellings, like English spellings, make little sense. Even German, with its complex grammar, is much more phonetic than either French or English.
    When French printers started attacking the problem of spelling, they had very few models to follow; the only defined languages at the time were Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Arabic. Some printers represented the sounds in, an, on and un asand—not a bad idea. The word champs (field) was written cha¯. It could have worked if printers had agreed on standards. But they tended to stick to their own coding systems and used accents in extremely varied ways. One can only assume that each printer’s readers got accustomed to his system and that the printers then feared alienating their customers and losing business if they changed (somewhat like early computer makers, who developed languages and operating systems that could be used only by their specific machines, a problem that for some reason took forty years to solve). It took French printers roughly the entire sixteenth century to get rid of variations in spelling and accents, and it wasn’t until French grammar books started appearing that real standards took shape.
    Besides, old habits die hard, and etymological spellings were already well-established among the lettrés, who were the primary consumers of books. Grammarians Jacques Peletier du Mans and Louis Maigret proposed making French spelling more phonetic in their respective books, Dialogue de l’ortografe et de prononciations françoèze ( Dialogue of French Spelling and Pronunciations ) and Tretté de la grammere françoeze (Treatise on French Grammar ). While the innovations they proposed all made sense, they were never accepted. Over the next centuries there were several other attempts to make French spellings more phonetic, but they also failed. The reforms would perhaps have taken root if French had had fewer literate speakers and little tradition to speak of. But etymological spelling had already become the norm, and a norme is always very difficult to change. It took the Spanish language academy over a century and a half to make their language fully phonetic.
    Grammar, previously the domain of monks and royal scribes, became a subject of study on its own during the sixteenth century. Like François I, grammarians (who were often printers) were obsessed with Latin; their chief motivation was not so much to define French as to show how French was distinct from Latin and Italian. The first real grammar of the French language was actually written by an Englishman, in Gothic letters. In 1530 John Palsgrave presented Lesclarcissement de la langue Françoyse —a book describing the multiple forms of French words and the grammatical structure of the language—to King Henry VIII and his daughter Mary, who was no doubt a victim of the Renaissance fashion for learning foreign languages. Twenty years later, Louis Maigret published the first grammar in France, his Tretté de la grammere françoez e. Dozens of grammars followed but, until the end of the century, spelling and grammar variation was still the rule in French. In fact, French essayist Michel de Montaigne (1522–90) used four different spellings for à cette heure (at this time): à cett’heure, astheure, asteure and asture.
     
    It’s hard to imagine a time when French writers were uncertain about the legitimacy and importance of their language, but that was the case in the sixteenth century. French was considered appropriate for vulgar