2023-08-26 16:30:00
In 1990, “the spelling corrections” were published in the Official Journal. Their goal: to bring spelling closer to pronunciation.
By Louise Cuneo, Emmanuel Durget
Published on 06/27/2019 at 12:06 p.m. – Modified on 08/26/2023 at 4:30 p.m.
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Circumflex accents, hyphens, the plural of compound words… A game for those who like tricks, but a nightmare for others, since certain rules are sometimes only arbitrary. Let them rest assured, the “new spelling” is made for them. Moreover, it is no longer so new as that, since the report was published in the Official Journal in 1990. These “rectifications” were designed to simplify spelling, particularly with regard to the hyphen, the plural of compound words, the circumflex accent, the past participle of pronominal verbs or other “anomalies”, mainly of pronunciation or accentuation.
From now on, it is therefore possible to put a hyphen between each of the digits that make up a number: before, you had to know that “twenty-six” was written with a hyphen, but “one hundred and four” without a hyphen of union. From now on, everyone is free to put it on systematically. Yes, “free to everyone”, because the rules of the “new spelling” do not make the previous ones obsolete: both spellings are valid. READ ALSO Can you match all these “everythings”?
You will therefore also be able to choose the plural rule for compound words with which you are most comfortable, knowing that the short story now follows the rule for simple words. Thus, compound words take the plural mark when they are plural. You have to write “un picke-dent” and “des picke-dentS”, just like “un garde-meuble” and “des garde-meubles”, without distinguishing, as was the case before, whether this is of a man or a place.
A ripe fruit on the wall
The plurals of words borrowed from other languages are also changing: from now on, Louis Armstrong and Scott Joplin are both “jazzmAnS” and “jazzmen”. Other words of foreign origin have been made plural: “des ravioliS”, “des sCénarioS” (with an S and even an É, let’s be crazy!), “des matches”, “des maximums”…
READ ALSOHow many mistakes would you make in the “biggest dictation in the world”? And what about the acute accent pronounced like a grave accent, especially in certain verbs conjugated in the future or in the conditional? Like “I will yield” with an “é”, but pronounced “è”. From now on, we can therefore write “I will give in”, with an “è”. Ditto for interrogative inversions: before, you had to write “can I”, now, you can write it with an “è”: “can I”. Another problem of accent: know that the circumflex accent can now disappear on the “i” and the “u”, except if it makes it possible to identify an ending, such as that of the simple past (“we wanted”), of the imperfect of the subjunctive (“that he loved”) or the pluperfect of the subjunctive (“that he would have followed”). It is also necessary to keep the circumflex accent when it brings a distinction of meaning: “a ripe fruit on the wall”. If we put aside these particular cases, we can therefore write without any accent “he likes it under the vault”.
Grave accent or double consonant?
Another new rule concerns the verbs in “-eler” and “-eter”: from now on, their ending can be modeled on the model of “peler” and “buy”: we write “larain ruissÈle”, “il étiquèTera”, and not with a double consonant, as we had to write until now. The last great new rule will please more than one refractory to the agreement of the past participle with the pronominal verb “to leave”. It becomes invariable in all cases, whatever its auxiliary and the location of its object complement: “She let herself be seduced. And you, do you like this spelling reform? (Yes, you can forget that accent, if you like it so much…).
#spelling #lives #easier