English mfs copying those words and once again changing their pronunciation <–
The irony of writing the post in English, isn’t lost in you, is it?
A lot of unpronounced letters are actually pronounced conditionally, for example in “Je suis un homme” the last s of suis is pronounced because it is followed by a vowel.
Is there a high-level explanation of how that clusterfuck happened? I mean, all the roman languages around France are fairly reasonable in their spelling.
There is an old explanation for this. I asked my French teacher a while ago.
The old French language was written like you pronounce it. During the renaissance, they got into classicism and made the language resemble Latin. Hence tan became temps from the Latin tempus.
The Latin thing is only a partial explanation. Some of it is changes in pronunciation coupled with a very authoritarian attitude to orthography. Few languages out there that changed so little in 400 years.
So for instance the -ent ending for plural verbs (“ils mangent”) is silent because the “ent” sounds were progressively dropped. Then the written suffix logically started disappearing, and only then did the Académie bring it back because it was more Latin. If it wasn’t for these reactionary fucks that rule would have been reformed centuries ago.
Unfortunately in the intervening time, knowledge of orthography became a very strong social marker. Because spelling French is so hard, the dictée came to disproportionately affect grades (seriously, old-fashioned schools still do it daily and it’s all graded and very severely), which coupled with the industrial revolution and alphabetization of the lower classes meant that shit spelling = prole = bad. So now orthography is at the center of the traditional value system which has all the conservatives pearl-clutching at the idea that children can’t spell “nénuphar” properly. Children’s purported inability to spell properly is like the number one moral panic that has sprung up every few years for the last century or two, but also orthographic reforms are woke (derogatory). The point of orthography, to conservative types, is for it to be hard so you can show off your perfect spelling to justify your social standing.
