Gabriel Radic

Rob observes that the “Conseil supérieur de la langue française” just made French a bit easier. Some examples from the post:

- sûrement devient surement
- événement devient évènement
- corolle devient corole
- des scénarii devient des scénarios
- vingt et un mille cent trente-huit devient vingt-et-un-mille-cent-trente-huit
– on n’écrit plus oignon mais ognon
– on n’écrit plus cuissot mais cuisseau
– on n’écrit plus relais mais relai

These two are a bitch to Rob, for some reason I wish I grasped:

- coût devient cout (!)
- contre-appel devient contrappel (!)

Of course, Rob is not happy about it, cause he’s a cranky old man who’s had it with youths slaughtering Proust on their pesky SMSs. But I, a barbarian slaughtering Balzac on my mails and blog, I can’t be happier about these changes. You see, French is actually easy to understand and get along with, especially for a Romanian, but its orthography is a killer. Where English has a few dozen irregular verbs and four pronouns, French has entire books on conjugaison.

Sure, the French will keep laughing their Molieriesque asses off when they hear a Belge saying “nonante-neuf”, but still, this is a step in the right direction. Here’s to the death of “quatre-vingt-dix-neuf”!