That Time Everyone in France Freaked Out About O(i)gnons
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- čas přidán 10. 01. 2022
- Is it oignon or ognon? Coût or cout? And why did everyone start tweeting #jesuiscirconflexe in 2016?
Written and Created by Me.
Art by kvd102
Translations:
Le Napolitain - French
Ivan - German
Leeuwe van den Heuvel - Dutch
I’m from Québec and removing the circumflex really annoys me because my accent pronounces it. It is doing the exact opposite of what it wants to do for me.
Yeah this is why as a québécois the spelling reform bothers me so much
Est-ce que vous prononcez le mot "fête" un peu comme on prononce le mot "fight" en anglais?
@@yahyazekeriyya2560 je suis d’accord.
@@yahyazekeriyya2560 merci!
Doesn't Quebecoise French follow a different standardization institute than the French Academy in France?
The problem with this spelling is that the letters "ign" formed the sound /ɲ/ back in the days of medieval french. Oignon (onion) and Seigneur (lord) are the two only word that kept that spelling in modern french. The change was made in other words like montaigne, who become montagne (mountain), by removing the confusing "i". That old way of spelling still remains in the name of French author Michel de Montaigne which most speakers now pronounce \mɔ̃.tɛɲ\ and not \mɔ̃.taɲ\ as it was before.
Those videos about spelling reforms are really good. Thank you for your work.
In seigneur it makes sense because "ei" makes the \ɛ\ sound
@@kthelemon I agree with you because in french we've got words like "seigle" (\sɛɡl\) in which "ei" makes \ɛ\ but what I was saying is that it may makes sense for that pronunciation but if you look at the etymology of the word "seigneur" we can relate it to the Spanish "señor" ( \seˈɲoɾ\) or the Latin "senior" that proves to us that the sound \ɛ\ really only comes from the "e" and that the phoneme /ɲ/ is made by the combination of letters "ign". I think it's just a coincidence that students still today look at this word and still get the correct pronunciation, a coincidence that didn't happen with "oignon" unfortunately.
Yes you’re exactly right. The trigraph “ign” made the /ɲ/ but nowadays this has morphed so that the /ɲ/ sound is produced by the digraph “gn” meaning that people often then mistakenly assume that the rogue “i” in the spelling actually changes the vowel quality, when really it’s just a redundant part of the /ɲ/ sound. As exemplified in your “Montaigne/ montagne” example.
@@kthelemon Ségneur would still be pronounced as senyoer
@@keptins you should probably use the ipa
Don't you dare to touch French people's onions. They love onions, especially fried, and they won't give them to the Austrians.
The South of the USA: But we enjoy ourselves blossoming onions though.
Oignons are really good fried in oil
Oh WWI
There's one information missing in this vidéo. Though a lot of dialects don't prononce the i in oignon anymore, it is still pronounced oignon by a lot of people, especially in the rural parts of France. One big problem people have with the Academy Française is also that they are completely biased by their parisian point of view, and don't take the rest of France into account as much as they should. This thing is not exclusive to language but also politics, and a lot of french people are tired of Paris' "centralisation" in decision making (and also how Paris is the only thing foreigners know about France)
Completely agree. Take the circumflex accent. It may be almost useless in France, but almost essential in North America, where "pâte" and "patte", or "votre" and "vôtre" are not pronounced the same way.
@@Xerxes2005 pâte and patte are also pronounced differently in the french speaking parts of Switzerland and Belgium (and probably some part of France too) and I personally am from Normandy and pronounced votre and vôtre differently.
@@Xerxes2005 better examples in québec we say maître like maétre (sorta) but spelling it like maitre could make it seems as though we should pronounce it as métre which ew, seeing the î tells me that i have to pronounce it as aé instead of é, most of the reforms are very very biased and absolutely do not consider dialects and i hate it
All true, but this spelling reform has nothing to do with the Académie Française, who are not involved in spelling reforms except to reject them (as they reject just about everything good and decent in the world).
There are already plenty of words in French that are pronounced in various ways regionally but have one standard spelling, and the former spellings are still accepted as valid (and even if they weren't, people would keep using it, especially if it happens to actually match their pronunciation) so I don't think it changes much that "oignon" is pronounced the intuitive way in some regions. Most opposition to language reform, at least in the media, came from the reasons cited in the video, not local dialects, which are largely sneered at by many of the same snobs who argue against spelling reform.
Even in dialects, pronouncing "oi"gnon is probably more of a bad pronunciation (even a historical one) than a cultural feature, since "ign" formed the sound "gn" in medieval french to begin with. Some people in rural areas may have just started reading the word literaly later, and then it spread. And tbh, this reform is for standard French, thus just applies to it, so I don't even see the point of that argument.
As an older but generally very progressive person, I am always amused when I catch myself being ‘horrified’ by change. The proposed changes make sense, and yet after six decades of eating oignons, seeing it without the i gives me a heart stopping lurch every time. The cognitive dissonance is extreme and terribly funny. So I can see why so many graduates of grammar school react poorly.
Despite ognon making complete sense, it just doesn't LOOK correct. When I see it, I think of ogres before onions. I'm sure this is not any sort of objective reason and making this change wouldn't do any harm, but I still can't shake the feeling of discomfort (Idk how else to describe it) that I get when I see it.
I am 22 so young and really, I am all for spelling reforms (especially the conjugation that everybody forget after the verb avoir) BUT ognon for me is like watching someone trying to put a square in a circle.
It juste does not look right.
It is so funny because it is a habit, but really I can not imagine spelling oignons anything else than oignons.
I read it "ô guenon" ("Oh female monkey"). However, I think oignon, onion & ognon should all be valid spellings of the word.
I'm not even a native French speaker but the new spelling disgusts me. Maybe it's because I speak English and I need to see the letter 'i' SOMEWHERE in the work 'onion'.
I guess you can say it's makes you go : OH NYON !!!
While I generally agree that the circonflex is a pretty useless thing when it comes to pronounciation, I always found it to be very helpful when memorising these particular words because the circonflex simply hides an s that was once there. L'île is isle and l'hôpital is hospital. A lot of french words make more sense when you take this into account imho.
Also it’s not useless in Quebec pronunciation. They shouldn’t reform it.
@@gregoryford2532 Drink not from the Pieran spring, young man. la forêt --> forestier, par example
Oh yeah? Explain this:
câble, âge, apparaître, symptôme, encore plus
They all have ^ on top of some letters yet have absolutely no reference to there being an S in there before, so what the heck?
@@resolvanlemmy my guess is those words just were added into English after french stopped pronouncing them
@@mckernan603To my ears (though non native) it's not useless in Swiss French or Walloon either. I've also seen people from Normandy and the South say that but I haven't heard it personally
The problem is that many dialects to pronounce is as "oignon", but the Academy Français didn't take them into consideration because they were biased towards Paris. But at the same time, they didn't say that is HAD to be spelled as ognon, just that it COULD BE, so it doesn't really matter.
Nonsense. If all children are taught the new standard the old form *will* die out.
@@TheFreekg They aren't being taught to only use the new form, though. As I said, it's optional.
@@miguelpimentel5623 In Brazil we have been spelling and pronouncing Egito (without a P) for a long time, we didn't know at all it had a P on the other side of the ocean. The removal of that letter wasn't even a question because it had been removed already. We do say (and spell) egípcio with a P, maybe that's where you are coming from? Here in Brazil we usually lament the extinction of the diacritic trema (ü) and é in idéia.
@@miguelpimentel5623 you can still spell them like that lol every word with two different pronunciations still accepts two different spellings, eg receção (PT) / recepção (BR), aspeto (PT) / aspecto (BR)
not to mention that in portugal plenty of people still spell the silent consonants because they DO affect the pronunciation, albeit not directly. these silent consonants indicate that the preceding vowel is pronounced as an open vowel as opposed to the usual reduced pronunciation
lastly, if you don’t mind me asking, i had never heard of such a portuguese accent that preserved silent consonants in words like *egipto* or *detective*; where are you from??
@@TheFreekg I was taught in school not to use prepositions at the end of words, but I still do. So imagine how prominent the old spelling will be if kids *aren't* told that it's wrong
As a native french speaker, i was today years old when i discovered you could write oignon as ognon. I almost didn’t believe it, but i looked in my dictionary, and there it was lol.
Same, but that's because I thought it was oignon vs onion.
french people: "what next, spelling it 'wazo'?"
some folks online: "pona a!"
best french spelling reform
oiseau -> wazo
écouter -> couté
couleur -> coulé
mourir -> mori
surface -> sufa
de l'eau -> delo
en bas -> anba
à la chasse -> alacha
échange -> échan
linge -> lin
epique -> epicu
as one of the "folks online"
pona :)
Pedantic prescriptivism is particularly weird when it comes to French, since it came to French in the middle of a dramatic change in word order, as evidenced by the double negation particles and some adjectives coming before a noun while others come after.
french without any spelling reforms EVER would not look like how it's pronounced AT ALL. Imagine still writing "estre" for "être".
And completely agree.
Also, prescriptivism means "according to the official language body", means that they are technically prescriptivistically incorrect
@@xwtek3505 ... where did you get that definition of prescriptivism?
@@notoriouswhitemoth no, seriously. what a shit definition.
@@kklein French with silent s? Unheard of!
My problem with the spelling reform of 'ognon' is that, as a native French speaker, I don't associate it with onions. It looks like a completely different word. I could get used to it, but unlike î and û, the word looks like gibberish with the spelling reform. I can't explain why, it just doesn't make sense. Dîner and diner look similar enough that I know they're the same word; oignon and ognon? One is a delicious vegetable and the other sounds like a very lost ogre
I'm a native French speaker too, and to me the only spelling that isn't purely foreign is "onion"... the english spelling. Ognon reads as "og-non", and oignon reads as "wag-non" or "oïg-non"
Si je dis pas de bêtises sans le "i" c'est une rivière ^^
Yeah because you grew up with it. It's all that is.
@@rynabuns Of course! That's all any of this is - if words changed every time we turned around, we wouldn't be able to communicate. Change has to be gradual, and there will always be old sticklers for the old way, but eventually we'll get used to it
One problem I see with attempts at spelling reforms to empire-spreading langages is that for some regional variation any reform would upset local usage. I would know, I'm a bilingual french Canadian. I'm still all for the effort thought
Fun fact I started saying wagnon a while back and I find hilariously natural
Wouldn't that only be a problem in languages that attempt to preserve historical spellings? In languages with phonetic spelling, different dialects just write differently.
I know of 0 languages which have phonetic spelling, but in theory, yeah it looks like you're right
@@yahyazekeriyya2560 My point exactly; a scritp is only phonetic for one subset of the speakers at one time un particular. Prononciation is messy
@@yahyazekeriyya2560 That sounds absolutely amazing, I can only imagine ^.^
0:59 that depends on your dialect : my aunt pronounces it literally "oignon" with a /wa/ sound
Edit : spelling
REALLY? Wow, I've never heard that! Where is she from?
She was from Algeria when it was still french (she is a Pied-noir), and now lives in Brittany
@@kklein hmmm... maybe keeping in these positions is like why we *should* keep ?
@@alexxxO_O this is not a bad point, I didn't realise this at the time I made this video. Though I would say there is an argument for the fact that this is FAR less common than maintaining the w/wh distinction, and also whereas "oi" can actually give the majority of people the INCORRECT pronunciation, "wh" could never be confused for something else in dialects which dont maintain the distinction.
@@kklein Ahhh I see. The fact that is more likely to give an *incorrect* pronunciation is why it's not too comparable... People with the - merger know to read as an allograph of like 100% of the time.
I am a foreigner, but French politics look really messy to me, considering the fact that politicians debated about such thing as spelling of the word "onion".
You are totally wright. French politics have a strange sense of priorities...
you should see American politics (And maybe British politics, but I'm not British, so I can't comment on that). "Oh! you can't use they as a singular pronoun. It's corrupting the English language". It's somewhat similar. (Although as I type this, I realize that they as a singular pronoun is a lot more important then onions, it's still a similar nothing argument)
@@L4oo. I'd argue the war on pronouns is very different. In France the debate around o(i)gnons is purely about linguistics, but in America and the UK the debate around singular "they" is a part of the much larger culture war.
(from 3:19 onwards) You seem to have grouped descriptivists with people who want to conserve historical spelling, because both groups ‘disagree’ with spelling reform, and then call out both groups for prescribing the old spelling.
Descriptivists are not ‘against’ spelling reforms and nor are they avocates for old spelling, they simply understand that both are valid ways to communicate. The organisations prescribing spelling reforms and the people wanting to keep the old spelling are both prescriptivists, which you do mention, but I think you should have made the distinction between them and descriptivists more clear.
Yes true, though what I was getting at was the idea that people who are actively wanting to conserve historical spellings are misusing the term "descriptivist" themselves when they say that that's what they're doing. A descriptivist would NOT disagree with spelling reform, but rather make no value judgements either way, as you point out. You're right though, I should have made that clearer in the video :)
@@kklein I feel like them calling themselves that has a lot to do with how AF is one of the most well known prescriptivist institutions in the entire world and was happy to enforce this while refusing to accept other changes in the language people actually cared about (especially gender neutralisation and English loans).
All these prescriptivism vs descriptivism arguments would make a lot more sense if people stopped lumping in "orthography / the technology of writing" with "language".
@@argh523 depth orthography you mean? What's wrong with that it means either phonemic\phonetical or not phonetical as in diff pronunciations in one unit aka preserving the etymology but sacrificing the phonetical script, allophones not included since that's in free variations usually.
The circumflex diacritic is not meaningless and not used merely to distinguish between homonyms, though it does not affect pronunciation. The circumflex is actually the result of a much older spelling reform, which removed many silent s’s in certain words. The accented vowel was once followed by a silent s. So for instance the noun hôtel, was once spelled, but not pronounced, hostel. Knowing this reveals a whole new class of cognates to English speakers.
Yeah, the circonflex usually is in a place where their used to be an S, and where usually still in other related languages (like forest and hospital). Not sure if it justifies still using it.
True, but many words with the circumflex never had an s there. It sometimes represent the loss of a different letter, like in “dûr”, “âge”, etc. and it’s (very inconsistently) used to indicate Greek omega (as opposed to omicron) and eta (as opposed to epsilon), in words like “diplôme”, “bêta”, “cône”. Sometimes it’s just there for no apparent reason, like in “suprême”.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 Yeah, thanks for explaining some of the less obvious cases. For me the weirdest is Viêt Nam which they spell like this for some reason.
@@19Szabolcs91 that’s because it’s spelled “Việt Nam” in Vietnamese. It’s just a vestigial diacritic like English has in “café”.
@@felipevasconcelos6736 Learn something new everyday.
Just another advantage to Canadian French where all those reforms are-for the most part-simply ignored.
Well, I think the new spellings are technically considered acceptable alternative spellings but I have never seen it spelled anything other than "oignon" in Canada. I’d be naturally inclined to opt for a hard G trying to read "ognon" but I fully admit to being old and used to the old spellings.
Some of the more pointless circumflex accents are slowly fading from use though, with the "circumflex to distinguish between homophones are kept" logic being a thing. Of course, we have a more complex set of vowel sounds than most European dialects so fewer of the "useless" accents are useless to us since they often are different vowels to us (no pâtes-pattes merger for example). Honestly, ditching those truly pointless ones is a good thing since they long ago ceased to have a purpose.
This reforms are not applied in most French school because a majority of French where againts it, most teacher never apply this.
You should research Dutch spelling reform, and unform and reform, example: Present was cadeau (as in French) new spelling was Kado (phoetically how it is pronounced) then reverted back to cadeau because people complained. Same with Bureau which changed to Buro then back. Problem is, on the side of the Elementary school nearby, there are poems plastered on the side of the school in very large letters. Ik weet niet wat in mijn Burola zit. ("I do not know what is in my desk drawer) When I first saw it, I asked what a Burola was, I know what a bureaula was, but had never seen Burola before, and aside from on the side of the school will likely never see it again. Dutch likes compound nouns (La = drawer).
changing Cadeau to Kado is just laughable, complete nonsense invented by some foreigners
"la" is such a comically short word
Yes, tell the world about the tussen-n...
@@Outwhere bedoel je de n in groente(n)soep of een andere tussen n.
@@dutchy1121 Allemaal eigenlijk. Boerenkool (altijd al een n), pannenkoek (nieuwe n), groentesoep (geen n). We mochten ook nog een tijdje paardebloem blijven schrijven omdat de plantennamen niet meededen.
French speaker here, I feel like just moving the I to Ognion would have made a bit more sense, though I don't mind the new one.
En sois, ça ne servirait à rien puisqu’on prononce naturellement un i quand on dit gn.
I wouldn't mind onion, but getting rid of circonflexe? Why? They indicated that there used to be an s there in the spelling, which is really helpful when learning sister languages.
Hôpital->Hospital
Coût->Cost
Hôte->Host
For hôpital, it even helps with linking it to other French words, like "hospitalité".
For hôte, the ô sound is very different from regular o...
It could be confusing without circonflexe.
It's only for î and û, and even then only if there isn't a corresponding word without the circumflex that would cause confusion.
@@marcusaureliusf île-> island
cloître - > cloister
Coût - > cost
... I still feel we'd be losing something for the sake of simplifying a spelling rule that isn't really problematic to begin with.
Also even if it's only î and û, it's still meaningful in some accents. For example, I'm Belgian and over here we pronounce those differently from their unmarked counterparts. I also know some people from France that do the same. The Academy should really take a look past the Paris ringroad once in a while.
@@yjlom Yep I'm not even native and I feel like he mis-characterized the controversy somewhat here because a lot of it was not about prescriptivism per sé it was about Parisian prescriptivism. But here's the the thing I think this could all be solved if the French government moved from a hard-line stance of correct French to just a suggested standard French. At the end of the day French is probably too big for standard writing to reflect the needs of everybody who speaks it but it with this it could be considered a cross dialectal form of writing rather than correct writing and that could ease tensions. I don't know exactly, and I don't know how one would institute that culture but Norway comes to mind in terms of how loosely upheld their writing systems are as correct. I've had plenty of Swedes on the internet tell me to go learn to write proper Swedish but Norwegians are more likely to say oh that's not of how they spell that in Bokmål (that's the writing I'm learning alongside the spoken language because it looks more like Danish and I'm trying to learn Danish as well)
In case you were wondering I'm Jamaican. I've been learning French for about 8 (Only 4 at any serious level) years now (Salut) I started Swedish in 2020 and Danish and Norwegian in early 2021 alongside an intro German course I just did at uni. So take my experiences with a grain of salt because I could be mistaken.
The accent circonflexe being useless may be true in Paris, but only because over time they lost the distinction in sound that it makes. In places like Québec where that distinction was kept and ê sounds very different from è, the diacritic is very useful.
The reform doesn't remove any circumflex accent on A, E, or O, though.
@@Mercure250 Belgian here and it's the same problem: it still applies to i and u (in lengthening them), though I will admit it's not perfectly consistant. They are also often the mark of a former s (or sometimes another letter) that used to follow the vowel, and that links the word to words in the same family where that s has not disappeared.
@@Bombur888 Québécois here. I was merely pointing that out because that was the examples used in OP's comment. But yeah, there are issues with completely removing "î" and "û" as well. But it's not like the traditional spelling doesn't have many, MANY issues too.
In my accent, the circumflex is very inconsistent. Even "â" and "ê" are inconsistent. I pronounce "âge" and "tâche" with the same vowel (long), but "câlin" with the same vowels as "matin" (short). I pronounce "fête" and "maître" with the same vowel (long), but "trêve" with the vowel of "sève" (short). Even worse : I pronounce "fève" and "mètre" with the long vowel, which means they don't rhyme with "sève" or "mettre". And "aide" and "baisse" also use the long vowel.
And while I do pronounce "boîte" with the long vowel, I also pronounce "coiffe" with it, while "soif" is short. Meanwhile, any "oî" at the end of a word (including ones with silent letters), like the name "Benoît", is just the short vowel for me. Same goes for "aî".
And when "î" is not part of a digraph, like in "île" or "abîme", it makes absolutely zero difference.
As for "û", the only word where it makes a difference for me is the word "jeûne". Which has the same vowel as "creuse".
And for crying out loud, even "ô" isn't perfectly consistent. A lot of accents, including ones from France, will say "hôpital" with the open "o", the one in "roc" and "botte", rather than the closed one that we hear in "fantôme". And I'm not even talking about the Southern accents and their roc-rauque merger.
We stopped writing those letters because we stopped pronouncing them. Yet, we still kept them in the form of an accent that doesn't even show WHICH letter was replaced... if there was even one to begin with ("câble" didn't really have such letter). The accents were useful a few centuries ago BECAUSE they were phonetic and allowed us to remove silent etymological letters.
Now, with pronunciation changing and evolving, in different accents and dialects, it's just become a mess. And I agree the way the reform decided to do things is questionable. I heavily disagree, for example, with changing "chariot" to "charriot" because we write "charrette"... why not the other way around, huh? I mean, we don't write "charr", you know?
But also, we do need to do something. The reforms are, in my opinion, a step in the right direction, despite its issues. I personally think that maybe we should just accept that we could have slightly different standards that reflect our differences in pronunciation. I mean British people write "colour", "centre", "organise" while Americans write "color", "center", "organize" despite the fact that it doesn't reflect a pronunciation difference ("colour" still rhymes with "actor" in British English, for example), and nobody died because of it or anything. Can we not allow French people to write "maitre" while you and I continue to write "maître", for example? The word is still recognizable, I don't think it's going to cause that much confusion.
But more importantly, we should stop seeing the written language as some kind of sacred thing. There was a time when spelling was extremely fluid and ever-changing. This relative status quo in spelling has only been a thing for the last 200-ish years, but also, the spoken language continues to change, without spelling adapting to the new ways. Change is normal, it should be welcomed. Society has changed in ways that would be impossible to imagine a few centuries ago, but for some reason, our written language is stuck in the past. It's important to know where you come from, but it's also important to look to the future.
@@Mercure250Ici en Belgique, on prononce bien admit et admît différemment, par exemple idem pour sur et sûr, mur et mûr, etc., et il y a d'autres différences d'attribution de longueur parmi les exemples que tu donnes. Et puis par rapport à la réforme, elle enlève le î justement surtout dans des digrammes. Mais oui, j'ai aussi dit que ce n'était pas consistant. Simplement ce n'est pas pour autant qu'on peut globalement affirmer "bôh, ça sert à rien, allez, on bazarde tout" (et on est d'accord là-dessus, d'après ta deuxième phrase). Il y a des variations régionales partout, et la nouvelle orthographe pas plus logique que l'ancienne sur ce point. En l'état, c'est un coup dans l'eau sur une logique, comme souvent hélas, très parisiano-centrée.
(Par souci de clarté, voici comment je prononce tes exemples en particulier :
âge, tâche, fête, maître, trêve, sève, fève, aide, baisse -> longue ;
câlin, matin, mètre, boîte, coiffe, soif, Benoît -> brève (et ironiquement, la voyelle de "brève" est longue lol).)
De plus, sur le principe, garder un circonflexe pour continuer de marquer l'appartenance d'un mot à sa famille même quand il ne se prononce plus, je ne trouve pas ça inutile non plus. Je ne pense pas que viser le 100 % phonétique soit forcément la panacée. Il y a des vertus ailleurs aussi.
Cela dit, ce n'est pas une question de sacralisation, et j'approuve la plupart des points de la réforme (dont les dérivés de char :P ; charette existe aussi avec deux r, je pense que la graphie double a été choisie car il y avait plus de dérivés qui doublaient leur r, tout simplement) et je trouve même qu'elle ne va parfois pas assez loin (sur les étymologie erronées, par exemple). Les seuls autres points qui me posent problèmes sont certains é -> è (pour des raisons similaires au circonflexe) et certaine suppressions de traits d'union dans les mots composés.
@@Bombur888 Là où je suis d'accord qu'on devrait pas se sentir obligé de faire du 100% phonétique et que faire le lien avec d'autres mots de même famille peut être intéressant, je m'inscris en faux par rapport à l'accent circonflexe, car l'accent circonflexe permettait justement de noter la prononciation différente de la voyelle tout en se débarrassant de lettres devenues muettes (surtout "s", bien sûr, car la plupart du temps, l'accent circonflexe servait à noter l'allongement compensatoire de la voyelle suite à la disparition du "s" à l'oral; il y a par contre pas mal d'autres cas comme "âme", qui provient de "anima", et qui n'a donc jamais eu de "s"). L'accent circonflexe servait donc à s'éloigner de l'étymologie et des graphies qui servaient à faire le lien avec le reste de la famille de mots, et se rapprocher de la prononciation de l'époque.
Mais avec l'évolution de la langue durant les derniers siècles, cette utilité phonologique s'est un peu perdue, et on se retrouve désormais avec un système qui n'est ni vraiment étymologique, ni vraiment phonologique. Un gros bordel. C'est pour ça que je suis plutôt en faveur de nous rapprocher du but initial de l'accent circonflexe, qui était de noter une différence de prononciation. Pareil pour les autres accents, d'ailleurs, qui avaient aussi ce but à leur création.
Sinon, de ce que je comprends, on est d'accord sur l'essentiel du fond : La réforme de 1990 a ses bons points et ses mauvais points, et la discussion ne devrait pas s'arrêter à si oui ou non on accepte cette réforme dans son entièreté. On peut chipoter sur quels détails on approuve ou désapprouve, mais personnellement, je veux surtout juste que les gens soient ouverts à la discussion, parce que j'en ai marre justement de cette sacralisation de la langue où la moindre petite suggestion de réforme est traitée comme le plus grand des blasphèmes (tiens, je prononce "blasphêmes").
Without the "I" it just looks disgusting really.
I think it looked ugly with the i
Third way: use the i but after the gn as in "ognion", which is similar to onion and indeed that i would indicate a palatalization of n which is the sound of gn.
i dunno, Ognon just looks weird. I think they have a point
It just looks weird bc it's actually the name of a river in France!
Would love a video/opinion on written Chinese simplification! Hugely beneficial to literary rate in China and Singapore, but often despised by scholars for losing the history! Although supposedly Ming and Qing officials intentionally made writing more obscure to reduce literacy and control the people more?!
This may be a hot take, but personally I don't think the simplification has contributed to literacy. Efforts to make schooling available for everybody and longer mandatory schooling has probably contributed much more. Getting everybody in the same country to agree on writing the same character for the same word instead of five different variations probably helps, but I don't see why writing 语 instead of 語 or 红 instead of 紅 makes a difference to literacy. You still have to learn the individual parts, how they fuction together and which word the character represents.
Also, saying that Ming and Qing officials specifically set out to make writing obscure to controle the population sounds contrived. There was a fair share of elitism, but I would think that a more natural explanation for the development of a more complex system was because China, like any other place, was a society in needed more precise terms and ways to write new words as the language developed and changed over the years. A good case study for this kind of process is the character for tea, 茶. We have archaeological evidence of tea being used in southern China from 100BCE, but there is no specific characters for tea before the early Tang in the 8th century. Before the Tang it is hard to know if a text is talking about tea or type of herb because they used the charater for the herb could be used for the actual herb or just phonetically because the two words sounded the same. Then in the early Tang you suddenly get 3 different characters all specifically meaning tea before 茶 becomes the only one used by the end of the Tang. It is a process that has always been ongoing in the Chinese writing system and it seems strange that it would be different for the Ming and Qing than for the earlier dynasties.
I'm confused as to why China didn't invest into some sort of Hangul-like script, but with five possible elements making up a syllable. I have developed my own iteration of such script and it was very easy seeing the tiny amount of allowed syllables in Mandarin. If distinguishing between different meanings conveyed by the same syllables a system of diacritics could be added and that'll be it
I absolutely adore your videos and style. You bring up new arguments, then completely dunking on them and bringing up better ones! :D
It just is so neutral to how humans think.
I also love how if you have nothing to say, you just cut it short and not beat around the bush! One of the best styles on the platform and I can't find anyone else like you :)
I'm french
I feel like Ognon just looks wrong.
And the circonflexe accent being used as a signifier that the word used to be spelled differently in old french is kinda cool.
Though i would be happy if we could get read of the Œ, it's not even on french keyboards and everyone write it "oe" anyways.
French person here
the circonflexe helps figure what kind of context the word is used because our phonemes are more limited compared to English (in my opinion ...) I don't personnally agree with whatever he's saying in his video but I'm interested to hear more to see if he can enlighten me on different things
the *i* in oignon isn't here to bother people when they first learn the language -- the ign part was here in older words like cigogne (cigoigne)
plus people in France don't really care about how you spell oignon right now
oh, and the circonflexe as you said before refers to older french which i think is easier for foreigners to learn
like the word château
château > castel > castle
I’m not French but I think that the circumflex and these peculiarities in the language spelling make it unique and “fancy”, I don't know why. _Oignon_ is a good-looking word, it looks right for some reason, while _ognon_ looks like there's something missing lol. But I’m not sure, since it's not my native language so...
As an American who, growing up, used to wonder what on earth pedophilia had to do with feet, I am wary of spelling changes that tend to obscure the etymology of words. That is my plea in favour of the accent circonflexe. For some of the other changes, I absolutely see the logic and can't poke too many holes in the arguments.
That's why, as someone who fully acknowledges the fluid nature of language, who struggled to learn French spelling in the first place, who was equally frustrated by the orthography rules that couldn't even be followed with a standard keyboard, who would occasionally engage in texting "koi de 9," who was comfortable using every linguistic shortcut the language afforded, and who hasn't even lived in France for years -- it really surprises me just how angry I get at the proposition of declaring ognon an acceptable spelling. Ce n'est pas un mot ! Ça s'écrit pas comme ça !
Reminds me of spelling reform in Thai.
Thai is tonal, so when recent toneless loanwords (especially English) enter the language, it was assigned a tone seemingly randomly, and the use of tone marks vary from ignore the tone marks to fully mark. Due to a messy orthography, there can be many letters representing the same sound (but might influence the tone), and some letters are preferred over others even though it doesn't make sense about the tone.
One day, the Royal Institute published a notice to change how to spell loanwords: mark all tones, This sparked much debate in the society, particularly about how ugly it is to write (example: should "specialization" be loaned as "สเปเชียไลเซชัน" or "สเปเชี่ย(ล)ไล้เซชั่น" (notice added mark that scales on another mark)).
But some English loanwords have been absorbed into everyday words and most people are perfectly comfortable writing tone marks for it, thus a decree to get rid of all tones wouldn't go well. So the Royal Institute just, stopped publishing about this (maybe they fear about the people starting to question their purpose but that's another story.)
The French language has such a straightforward and perhaps concise pronunciation when expressed in IPA, it just seems to sound fancy and complicated when spelt.
Edit: added some stuff in
@Hernando Malinche it’s cuz a Japanese person won’t say [boku], they’ll say something like [bo̞kɯ̟ᵝ]. The key difference being the ɯ̟ᵝ, the compressed unrounded version of [u].
P.S. saying /boku/ for Japanese would’ve been fine (better) since [] and // mean different things. [] for denoting the precise pronunciation and // for a more broad guide on the pronunciation that is specific to the language in question. It’s an important distinction in the IPA
@Hernando Malinche I mean, again, you’re using /boku/ with the “/ /“ very loosely here. /boku/ for French is _actually_ pronounced as [boku], meaning it is pronounced with a close-mid back rounded vowel, i.e. [o] in IPA, and a close back rounded vowel, i.e. [u]. Japanese doesn’t sound like that cuz it uses different vowels than [o] and [u] for what people usually denote as /o/ and /u/ in Japanese: close near-back unrounded vowel [ɯ̟ᵝ], not rounded [u] like in French, when we use /u/ in Japanese, and a mid back rounded vowel [o̞], not close-mid like in French, for /o/ in Japanese. It doesn’t have the [o] and [u] of French and that’s why it sounds different. We use /o/ and /u/ in Japanese to mean [o̞] and [ɯ̟ᵝ] because it’s quite tedious and unnecessary to write [o̞] and [ɯ̟ᵝ] all the time if we know we’re talking about Japanese, where [o] and [u] don’t occur. Basically sounds written with “/ /“ will sound differently in different languages cuz we use them within bounds of the specific language in question, but sounds written in “[ ]” will sound the same across the board, as defined in the IPA.
But there are thousands of languages in the world and there are among those thousands that, if they have the word /boku/, will pronounce it the same way as in French. Like for example, “boku” in Turkish, which is an accusative form of the word “bok” meaning “poop”, is pronounced pretty similar to “beaucoup” (maybe the /o/ is a bit more of a mid vowel rather than close-mid).
So TL;DR (sorry for the long-winded reply), French is not really unique in its pronunciation of its words. Sure French might sound good for you but there’s no inherit French-ness in the sounds it uses, since there are so many languages in the world that share aspects of the French phonology.
@Hernando Malinche It's because it's litterally not the same sound, the french word 'beaucoup' (which means 'a lot' or 'many') is pronounced /boku/. While the japanese word 僕 (which means 'I') is pronounced /boky/. While in french /boky/ sounds like 'beau cul'... Which means 'nice ass' !
So, no, beaucoup and 僕 aren't pronounced the same...
That's because the IPA was invented by French and British people lol
@Hernando Malinche Duh, because they are not the same sound. [bo̞kɯ̟ᵝ] =/= [boku]. o̞ =/= o, ɯ̟ᵝ =/= u. As far as the IPA is concerned, these are completely separate, unrelated sounds.
17 yo french guy here, never ever saw "ognon" written anywhere.
All my life I've seen "oignon"
The end of this video is some kind of muddled bad faith abomination of semantics and imagined enemies. I thought about it a lot, and the only detail whose sharing I think benefits either of us in any way is this: I hate it.
Oignon looks better
We should keep the circumflex accent in french since it does change the pronunciation in a lot of dialects, namely Canadian french. Also, it helps distinguish some words like "tâche" and "tache".
You will be pleased to learn that none of the circumflex accents on A, E, or O are removed by the 1990 reform.
recently discovered your channel - you’re awesomeeeee
There are people who will get outraged about everything except the things which really matter
I've really enjoyed your videos mate. You've definitely earned a new subscriber.
In the Netherlands there was (and is but mostly was) the conflict between the green booklet and the white booklet. In 2006 the Dutch language union changed a couple of spellings which weren't logical etymologically, or differed from the rule, They wrote these reforms in their newest green booklet (which describes official Dutch spelling). Ideeënloos (idealess) was changed to ideeëloos, pannekoek (pancake) to pannenkoek and persé to per se. Before that both spellings were allowed I think. This led to some outcry because it really made spelling more difficult. Pannenkoek and per se are really pronounced as pannekoek and persé, and to many people ideeënloos made more sense than ideeëloos. Therefore another Dutch language association made an opposing booklet, the white booklet, with the old, phonologically more logical spelling, it was only used in the Netherlands, not in Belgium, but by all major media. Sadly the green booklet spelling is learned in school, therefore it has, at this point, almost entirely taken over, which does make the Dutch spelling the same in both the Netherlands and Belgium again, but also makes it harder.
In Brazil we had a spelling reform a few years ago and people really didn't like that word "idéia" became "ideia" (meaning idea).
People also complained about the loss of the umlaut (called "trema") as it made the pronunciation of some words like "lingüiça" a bit ambiguous.
the loss of the trema was incredibly dumb, everything else made sense
nice pfp
Great video, I've always found French's orthography beautifully regular in many regards. I think changing the spelling to ognon would just fit with the regularity present in the rest of the languages, I hope the opposition to this change finally just accepts it.
I was in a canadian french immersion school when this happened.
good to finally know who the "ils" who keeps changing the language is. and who to blame for another part of that reform messing with my math class. (they also changed how to spell out words and there is now like five different ways and no one in my school, teachers included, had any clue with was right)
nice pfp
@@RichConnerGMN thank you
French is my maternal language and I just want to say your Pronounciations are really good, Thanks alot for not triggering me,
The Americans of the TF2 community cant say "L’Étranger" and say "let-ranger"
tbf its just easier that way
@@TeleTrenta you are the reason spy is ruined to me
@@ze_baronkrigler7611 sorry? Misspronouncing the name of a single weapon is the reason an entire class, with a dozen other weapons and mechanics and nuances is ruined for you. Nevermind the games bigger problems like bots that make spy's inves worthless, or the fact he only has one watch worth using without getting bored to death, how petty are you?
@@TeleTrenta yes
And don't forget, no wagnons for Austrian people !
i think that old orthography is interesting because of what it can reveal about the way that things used to be pronounced or spelled in a language, but changes to orthography are literally part of this process and fighting it seems so silly knowing how different most languages are in both pronunciation and spelling from the way they were just a few centuries ago.
it is oignon and will forever be
Man, I am always so impressed by your German pronunciation. Spot on!
Ah yes the wonderful world of spelling reforms. As a German who was starting its school career right after the first reform and then was at the end of it after the second and being pretty confused at first because of it, I am pretty involved in this. The most fun part is that even though I was directly effected by it it i could not have cared less about it at that time. And mostly because the reform simplified the spelling it was rather nice. It made spelling so much easier. And I remember the onslaught against it even though I consciously realized it only years later. People were saying it was simplyfying the spelling as if that was sth bad and not the intended purpose.
Years later I studied law and all reforms of the study of law were met with the same warning of simplyfying the study of law.
My conclusion was that especially people who are against the change are mostly just bitter suffering through the difficulties and developed a sense of elitism to rationalize the difficulties they encountered. And now they want those difficulties to remain because otherwise their suffering would be somehow invalidated.
So yes I am pretty much in favor of spelling reforms. And there are a few things left that would need adjustment in the German spelling.
And some new developments reigned in as well, because even though the ß was mostly removed from many words, those that kept it kept it for a pretty important reason it stresses the vowel before it. Sadly due to the internet and the English language having no ß it was dropped on many occasions which makes the distinction between the maße(measures) of a woman and the masse(mass) pretty difficult nowadays
reminds me of when ppl get upset at things like using "like" as a filler word, using "couple" to mean more than two, the singular "they", and using "literally" for emphasis. ppl say "no, that's not what the word means!" when it's being used that way, so, by definition, that IS what the word means
Quality video
more like quality channel
Dude how many languages do you know? Cause this and the German video has got me convinced that you're at least trilingual.
English, French and German is a based combination, the trifecta!
@@denniswilkerson5536 vraiment? Das wusste ich nicht.
As long as the austrians dont get any o(i)gnons.
J'aime l'oignon frit à l'huile!!!
As a French Canadian I have always pronounced the ''Oi'' in ''Oignon'' as the Italian ''oi'' due to the gn after the i. Without the gn i pronounce the ''i'' in ''toi'' in a short and darker way (Almost sounds like ''Toé'') . France's Frenchmen are just weird for pronouncing ''oi'' as ''wa''. ''Toi'' is supposed to be pronounced with the first half of the o and the i together, not as ''twa''. ''â'' in ''Théâtre'' is supposed to be pronounced with a lifted palate, but Frenchmen speak on the tip of their lips so they don't and just say ''théatre''.
saying we should uphold the __status quo ante bellum__ isn't a form of prescriptivism. Its just a rejection of the new system. There isn't even a fine line or a small difference either. The onus is on the person who made the suggestion to justify the changes rather than demand everyone else explain why its bad, and its up to everyone else to agree or disagree. If they think the new system looks stupid, that isn't prescribing the old, that's rejecting the new. Huge difference
I think the issue with "oignon" is more a question of frequency of use. Since you're buying onions all the time to cook, it's a word and spelling that sticks easily in your mind. That means that maybe when you're a kid, you'd spell it with a mistake, but growing up, it becomes part of your daily life. But then, if suddenly it changes (just for the sake of change, since few would make the mistake), you wouldn't be happy (the same way you wouldn't like a new spelling for, I dunno, Tesko, MacDonald's, Coka-Cola...).
The ß disappeared more easily in German, because alternatives were already existent and possible (like in Switzerland), so it felt like a gradual change. And it's also more convenient to eschew a letter found nowhere else. The "i" in "oignon" was unnecessary to delete, and very remarkable, so obviously it made for controversy.
This is the cutting edge linguistic news drama I live for
The problem with spelling reform is that in order for it to work, you'd have to ensure that each word could only be spelled one way, e.g. that a word like dog would have no possible alternate spellings, like dahg, dogg or dahgg. In order to do this, there would have to be so many picky rules that it would just make things worse.
"you'd have to ensure that each word could only be spelled one way"
why? why can't you just make the language a little bit less hellish? I mean, portuguese (my native language) has had spelling reforms, and there are still different ways you could spell words, like exato could be "ezato", cima could be sima, mau and mal sound the same etc, but I can confidently say it is still a much better system than the one english has, you know intuitively how words are spelled maybe 75% of the time and how they are pronounced 90% of the time
@@davigurgel2040 Well, at least English isn't as hard to read and write as Japanese and Chinese.
@@davigurgel2040 The standardization of spelling is the one thing keeping English orthography from being a complete free-for-all. Introducing alternative spellings just adds another layer of chaos, and opens the door to resurrecting outdated spellings, because "this is how Shakespeare, my archaic bible, or some some other old and illustrious document spelled it" would be a valid argument.
@@davigurgel2040 I suppose you are brazilian because in european portuguese these sounds are all fundamentally different. Which is why spelling reforms are not always liked. There will always be changes that make no sense to some. One very comical example is the reform that erased the silent p before consonants, like Egypt and Egyptian. Egipto became Egito, which for a lot of people made no sense because they pronounced the p, but egípcio, the adjective, kept the p. So by reforming the portuguese language they erased the way regional accents are expressed, but also created weird special rules, where there are standard rules to make adjectives but suddenly letters appear out of nothing.
The circumflex accent actually mean that there was an s following the vowel in ancient french or in latin like in "Être"(to be) in latin it's "Ester" (I think)
estre is Old French.
Also want to add that in avademia, English speaking academic journals have spelling prescriptions, that tell you to use either American or British spelling standards. Sometimes, they're nice and they say it doesn't matter which one, so long as it's consistent. There will always be language prescriptions so long as there are institutions that use writing. Might as well prescribe sensible spelling.
People will never agree on what a sensible spelling for English would be, though everyone agrees, the one we use right now, is far from it...
I completely forgot about this until I saw the thumbnail for this. It's funny looking back on it how some people really did care about the change, although most accepted it just made sense.
The reason why the "I" in "Oignon" was silent is, for the same reason as in the word "Kouign-amann", that in Old French, "ign" was the way to write the equivalent of a Spanish ñ in French instead of just "gn", and those two words maintained the orthography when every other word changed.
Also, I'm sorry but I have to point out that the circumflex accent can be on any of the 5 most common vowels, not only u and i, in words such as "château", "suprême" or "hôpital"
Though I agree, and many people do, that people who are frustrated about this spelling reform are just ridiculous to most of us French people, and we can't blame the """official""" French language institutions for doing something linguistically logical for once
Italian gn is ñ
Kouign amann isn't a French word but a Breton one!
@@gamermapper It's a French word in the way that it's used by French people in French sentences, it's not because it comes from another language that it's not French, or else "orange" isn't a French word, to give one out of millions of examples.
And if you can argue "kouign-amann" is a Breton word, the plural "kouign-amanns" is French only, since the Breton plural is "kouignoù-amann"
@@MajaxPlop darn do breton celtic people get pissed like how austrian is called germans when theyre called french? i gotta read more of these comment section interesting case ive checked the wiktionary and thats correct
@@prezentoappr1171 well I don't live in Brittany but I know some Breton people and most of them call themselves French, I don't know if they'd call themselves Breton before calling themselves French, and some jokingly 'militate' for their independence as a joke between friends, but Bretons speak French and most of them consider themselves French, from what I've experienced (which is not representative)
what does not make sense at all is the diacritic ù in ou vs où because it is the only case. I know that it is of a very common use but it could be used with the circonflex diacritic as "oû". Conversely, the circonflex diacritic in dû vs du, could use the grave accent as "dù". What grind my gears however is the azerty keyboard with an exclusive key for ù. Christ, can't they get a proper keyboard with accents marks to be combined with every other vowel instead of dedicated ones? That would make them much more versatile to write in other languages
As a quasi-native french speaker, ognon is definitely the more sensible way of writing it, but having an 'i' in the word for onion seems the most fitting to the actual meaning of the word. 'ognon' seems like a very heavy word, but the 'i' kinda serves as a reminder of the freshness and sting of a raw onion (because, when it is pronounced, the 'i' in french is a high pitched and shrill vowel, like 'ee' in english). So yes, i'm arguing in favour of the 'i' just purely based on vibes.
Well, then... how about we split in two? Similar to « réglisse » which has the particularity of being a feminine noun when it designates the plant but can be masculine when it comes to candies... from now, we could used « ognon » to designate the plant whereas the bulb when specifically used whilst cooking can either keep the traditional spelling « oignon » or... « ognon » once again, if you feel like it.
In any case, it's not as if the former spelling was proscribed or anything...
"Riksprovet i franska" is a test in French grammar and vocabulary, which is taken by all French teacher students in Sweden. Interestingly, among the 3 750 words we had to learn, "onion" was one of them. In the official vocabulary list it was spelled as "un oignon", this was in late 2020.
Let me propose a simpler explanation for the (legitimate) outrage : It's just ugly as f*ck.
It looks as dumb as a "I don't no what your talking about".
For a grown up french speaker, "ognon" looks like a word written by a child or an iliterate person. As simple as that. It might sound elitist, snob, and you can argue all you want about it in a sort of utilitarist perspective, but the aesthetic of this language is very important and a source of pride rooted in centuries of literature masterpieces. So it really feels like levelling down the education of our kids. Heck, it's not like oignon is a rare word ; it's one of the most common ingredient for cooking! You see it everywhere. The reform might sound "logical" for a non-native speaker since it erases a confusion for them while learning, but the point is, it's a very common word and there was literally no need to change it. And I will never agree to dumb down the writing of this noble language because some kids in school or some foreign learners make some orthographic mistakes while learning to write.
circumflex is one that i really like as a french language learner because it typically marks a place where the letter s used to be written but no longer is. it is helpful for words like forêt, meaning fore(s)t or île, meaning i(s)le, or the one that it helped me the most with, fenêtre, meaning window. i would not have been able to memorize that one if it wasn’t for the hint that there used to be an s in the word reminding me of the english word “defenestrate,” meaning to throw someone out a *window.* is it necessarily for a fluent french speaker? i’d imagine not, but it certainly is helpful for me, someone learning the language
I think it would have been better to, insteadof getting rid of it, move the i behind the gn. So "Oignon" => "Ognion". Begause those linguists who talked about the "softening" of the gn werdn't completely wrong. In words like "montagne" the gn is softened by the e after it. It's mike how the letter c is pronounced /s/ before e and i, but /k/ elsewhere. And this way you still get rid of the Oi digraph at the start of the word. Win-win
We still learn the old spelling of French in the German-speaking part of Switzerland
interesting, did not know that - both are equally valid after all
Writing doesn't exist to look cool, but to be funcional
I feel like a lot of it is just discomfort that's not logical that they have to rationalize after the fact. I don't like devellopping. Maybe it makes more sense maybe it fits orthography rules better maybe it's just plain better, but I don't like it. I don't have a reason why I don't like it it just looks ugly to me. For some people that's not enough and they need to turn their aesthetic judgments into rational arguments no matter how flimsy
Hindi speaker here:hindi script (devanagari) also had some changes made, not to make it phonetic, but to simplify the crazy amounts of noun clusters. Elders are some times confused by it, but they deal with it, and it's a success.
BTW luv your content man!
I love your take on prescriptivism and people's contradictory aversion to it!
This is nice. I vote for change as time changes too.
I'm french and had no real opinion on if it's a good or bad thing to change some spelling rules now and then, yes I can admit that the french language can be complicated to learn and for no reason.
Does it "need" to be simplified I don't know or care enough to be bothered, what I do know it's as long it will be used, it will keeping evolving like it has already did since it's inception. (By the way my parents and before them my grandparents, have managed to learned it just fine, so if something happened between their time and my, that not about the language but it's teaching methods that haven't followed fast enough the evolution of the language, and that it's own subject on itself.)
If I would express an opinion it be that: writing and grammar aren't real things, they're artificial, conventional, arbitrarily made up tools, conveniences for transmission and expression of human languages/communication, to the likeness of mathematics, physics, or any other sciences are tools for the human mind to get around some constant of this universe. But unlike other sciences, no right or wrong apply behind the boundary of the human realm and experience or correlates to any natural instance.
So wassup with all the fuss seriously? That just politics reminding of their existence, french people complaining about stuff what a shocker and foreigners telling that difficult for them to learn a language that isn't their own.
I think that removing the i in oignon is a good idea. Most people find that oignons are irritating to the i anyway.
French isnt hard to learn, I learned it when I was still a stupid baby
After watching this video, I kept thinking about it and I think I've found something you got wrong: French people aren't angry at prescriptivism, they're angry at the lack thereof.
As someone from Spain, I can sympathize a bit.
So... imagine you alway had to learn a certain set of spellings, and have got used to them and quick at reading and writing them, and they look just right. Like you, everyone you know uses them, and they work fine.
Then, after maybe some slight pronunciation changes, some people in the newer generations start having trouble learning them. So the government can do 3 things:
Keep them. This won't anger anyone, but, after significant sound changes, may become unfeasable (ehm English).
Spelling reform. This can end very well or not really happening (ehm color vs colour)
Say anything will do.
I believe this third option is, often, the worst. For one, it looses on some ethimological information, and encourages further erosion of the spelling. It also just looks wrong to much of the population, which will immediately backlash. Furthermore, it basically only benefits people who are learning, and not really, since having more potential spellings can make things more confusing (ehm English wtf).
But the main reason I believe it to be a flawed approach is the following:
Imagine tou are growing up after the change. In Spanish, for example, this could be after the accents on demonstrative pronouns were removed (they distinguish a word from another one that sounds the same but is a determinant (este vs éste), which is usually clear from context anyway). If you grow up then, you probably won't be told about the optional tilde after quite late, and won't naturally learn to use it; however, if you apply to a job and don't know how to use them it kinda gives the impression that maybe you don't read very much, and don't care about the way you write, which could be bad for some fields.
I hope you get what I mean, in case you read this. Sry for the badly redacted comment.
Whether you agree or not, I love your videos, just thought that I should let you know not everyone hates prescriptivism. I myself velieve there should be a mix of both (why «almóndiga», why did you have to do this to us, RAE...).
Thx for reading.
Mersi bükü, jėm set vidiyü
There is this thing where we experience everything that changes after the age of around 32 as an immediate threat and discomfort. However, it is not us, the old people, who have to live with the implications, it is the young people learning nonsense that have to. And as soon as they grow up, and are in power to make decisions and change things to the better, they will have grown as uncomfortable with any change as we have.
This reminds me of when Pluto was no longer a planet. Worldviews shattered, people emphatically declaring "Pluto will always be a planet to me" and now we.. what.. forgot it happened because it doesn't matter?
"your ridiculous orthography", said a person in English, the language that itself has a ridiculous orthography...
(maybe, partly due to the Old French influences)
I love it when language becomes more logical. It makes everything a tad more simple. For example: I am german, but I still struggle writing "Struktur" (ger. structure) correctly. The u is spoken short, so I allways assume the word to be written with ck instead of just k, as "Strucktur", like Sack, Pack, Versteck, etc. even though it is wrong.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't consonant cluster "kt" mark a short vowel?
Teaching language as it is written is not the same as the prescribing the old spellings!
If you say that little kids have to learn French, for instance, that's being prescriptive about children _learning_ French. That's not _linguistically_ prescriptive in itself, it's not prescribing what French _is_ . It's only saying that whatever French turns out to be (which a descriptivist would assess empirically, looking around and seeing what usage they see), kids should learn it. It's perfectly possible to be prescriptivist about the act of teaching language and descriptivist about the form of the language you are teaching!
No. Through the act of teaching the language, you are turning your descriptive statements about how the language works into prescriptive ones about how it should be. It's not real descriptivism, because if you were really being descriptivist, you wouldn't make value judgements about reforms, just like you wouldn't make value judgements about what the language currently is. I personally don't agree with the whole idea that prescriptivism is inherently bad in linguistics - but if you are opposing a change in the language, you are by definition prescribing something, and therefore should not hide behind the guise of "descriptivism".
Teaching a specific spelling of words is prescriptivist, and slows the changes that would occur without all of the correcting that teachers do of students' spelling. So that the language that descriptivists describe changes slower than it would without the prescriptivist forces at work. We didn't always mandate certain spellings, it wasn't really a thing in the English speaking world until the 1800's. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistic_prescription_in_English Without the standardization, we probably wouldn't be in as dire need of spelling reform as we are currently. Will linguistic prescriptivism become a historical fluke/fad? I think so
@@kklein I don't agree that teaching how something is is equivalent to advocating for that thing.
One can teach the history of, say, Marxism, or feminism, or Aztec sacrificial cults without that being a prescription for worker uprisings, or smashing the patriarchy, or throwing people off pyramidal temples.
If you demand the usage of that form of the language outside of the learning environment, rather than description of that form of the language within the learning environment, then yes, that'd be prescriptive. But demanding that people continue to use language as it is currently used is a separate issue from the act of teaching how language is currently used in itself.
@@zak3744 I didn't say that teaching something is equivalent to advocating for it. What I said was specifically in the context of teaching languages. the teacher will be telling people that they are spelling words WRONG. That's a prescription. If someone writes "ognon" instead of "oignon", the teacher will correct them. That is a form of prescriptivism, just because it's derived from an idea of "what the language currently is" doesn't make it non-prescriptive, that's ridiculous.
@@zak3744 The current education system in the English speaking world does not just teach how the language is currently used, but also will fail you if you do not use 1 particular spelling. Requiring that hegemony in spelling for 13+ years will drastically change how people use the language outside of the learning environment. It is also outright prescriptivism within the learning environment. This is a very recent phenomenon in the history of English: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_linguistic_prescription_in_English
Hi ! I like your video very much. I just wanted to say that the infamous "i" in "oignon" come from old / middle french when the letters "ign" use to be the way of pronouncing the actual /gn/. You can find it aswell in the old spelling of mountain (i.e. "montaigne") ; also the french philosopher Montaigne, use to be litteraly Mr. Mountain. So you can't realy read "oignon" with "oi" for /wa/ in this case.
I think the real opposition is because ognon looks rather less elegant than oignon, which goes against everything the French language stands for.
Maybe this is just me, but I feel like people would be more upset about letters being dropped or replaced than being added to.
Un "ognon" ne sera jamais un oignon.
It's funny to see how people reacted to that reform. We had a (minor) spelling reform in Portuguese too, but people barely remarked its existence anyway, yet they "write closer to the post-reform" nonetheless. I put that in quotation marks because it's hard to have an outrage against a spelling reform that only removed accents.. if your population is undereducated enough to even use accents in the first place.
I literally texted a friend who is learning French while watching the video and asked him how do you say onion in French (I have never learned French myself). He said oignon, and without me even asking, he followed it up by saying "(it is pronounced waniόn btw)". I think this is sufficient proof that the old spelling is weird and confusing.
A couple of years back catalan got rid of a lot of diacritic accents (from around 150 to just 15) and now that makes me hate the situations when I don't remember if a word that previously had a diacritic still has it or not
Tbf the circumflex is etymologically really interesting
3:09 I really like your pronounciation of Eszett, do you speak German fluently?
One thing Hungarian does - when the new edition of the spelling bible is released every 20-30 years - is adjust the spelling of a few words to reflect the changes in their pronounciation. Hungarian has a pretty straightforward and consistent spelling, but there are a handful of tricky words that students my age had to suffer with. Like when a vowel is clearly pronounced long, but it has to be written as a short vowel (most likely because it used to be pronounced short). Well now the “wrong” spelling - using the long vowel - is the correct one!
I recently learned that they changed "oignon" for "ognon", and while I wasn't happy with that change (my first language is french), I do have to agree that it makes sense. It just... doesn't feel right. I wouldn't go as far as to protest about it, but it just feels wrong, y'know?
As someone learning french, i love circumflexes!
I appreciate your pointing out that resistance to change is universal, but as a French person I have a feeling that the level of linguistic prescriptivism in France reaches exceptional heights. An overwhelming majority has simply never, and will refuse to, call into question any of the linguistic dogma that are pervasive in our culture. What's especially frustrating is that you can't bring logic into the discussion, because then you will be accused of trying to rationalize language (obviously I agree that making a language rational, whatever that means, is neither possible nor desirable, but that shouldn't eliminate any kind of critical thinking). Really feels like a religion.
All these years I've been spelling it "onion" and pronouncing it accordingly too. Never knew it actually had a different spelling in French.
im french and i like the oignon -> ognon change but im soooo used to "oignon" it feels so weird
I’m French and I never really payed attention that Oignon had an I…well I would prefer to actually pronounce it as it sounds.
I'm an English speaker and it looks wrong without the 'I'
@@denniswilkerson5536 Because the English word "onion" has an 'i'. Difference is, it's actually pronounced with an 'i' in English. No reason for the letter to be there in French.
> pronounce it as it sounds
no shit!
@@gkky-xx4mc There actually is a reason to include the ‘I’ because the word ‘onion‘ is a French loan word. The English received onion from French speakers, so why not revert to the spelling that the English use and continue to pronounce it the same as you currently do in French? The pronunciation is already near exact between both French and English.
@@denniswilkerson5536 Again, the English word is actually pronounced with the "i", on-ee-on. In French, the "i" is completely silent, it doesn't even turn the "oi" into a "wa-" sound, like in "oiseau". It's just an outdated and archaic spelling in French. You can't compare it to the English spelling.
You know french is fucked up when a foreign word better reflects the french spelling (onion>oignon)
If I were from the metropolitan area of Paris I might find myself agreeing with your take, but seeing as I am from Québec, were we very much pronouce our "oi" in onion and circumflex accents (Â,Î,Ô,Û and Ê), this video really misses the mark for me. Others have given a merriad examples, but without hearing the difference I guess it's hard to picture.
I think you would probably get along well with Linguisticae (a french youtuber that talks about linguistics).
3:02 I sometimes misspell the word as devellopping simply because it _feels_ right, but then when I see it, it _looks_ wrong and I fix it.