Off with Their S's!
After trying to explain a bit of the evolution of French spelling to some co-workers yesterday and having them only grudgingly believe me, I tried looking up the matter without coming up with anything concrete. While this article on the circumflex does mention that the circumflex indicates a dropped s in French, it doesn't actually spell out the history of it.
The French revolutionaries decided to drop the silent s that followed a vowel and preceded a consonant; it was the spelling of the Marquis and simply had to go, along with their heads. (Revolutionaries often change language, the names of months, etc.) In order to show that they weren't simply ignorant (for the pedantry runs deep in French blood), they annotated the preceding vowel with a circumflex: côte, fenêtre, hôpital, râpé are all examples of this. École is another example of a word with a dropped s (being derived from the Latin schola, from which we get the English school), but for some reason an acute accent was used in place of the circumflex in this example.
The French revolutionaries decided to drop the silent s that followed a vowel and preceded a consonant; it was the spelling of the Marquis and simply had to go, along with their heads. (Revolutionaries often change language, the names of months, etc.) In order to show that they weren't simply ignorant (for the pedantry runs deep in French blood), they annotated the preceding vowel with a circumflex: côte, fenêtre, hôpital, râpé are all examples of this. École is another example of a word with a dropped s (being derived from the Latin schola, from which we get the English school), but for some reason an acute accent was used in place of the circumflex in this example.
posted by Flicken @ 11:32 AM
2 Comments:
At 10:17 PM ,
Anonymous said...
Salaam:
//The French revolutionaries decided to drop the silent s that followed a vowel and preceded a consonant//
Please give your ôurce.
At 12:32 PM ,
Flicken said...
Bonjour Grudgingment,
First of all, your comment request appeared in my spam folder. Normally, I don't look in there at all but I was looking for something entirely different and noticed it.
Secondly, ôurce is of course, îlliness, because the s is not silent, does does not follow a vowel and does not precede a consonant.
Finally, I normally do not provide references. This is a blog, not a research journal. In the future, requests for references will likely be ignored.
There are some scattered online sources for this:
1. Check the Wikipedia article on Guillaume de l'Hospital, where they mention that the Marquis spelling for it is with an, 's'.
2. Check the Wikipedia entry on French orthography, where they mention that the circumflex was added in the 19th century. Also note that the French Revolution ended in 1799, right at the very end of the 18th century.
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