Re: [OT] Close to latin

From: Alain LaBonté  (alb@iquebec.com)
Date: Wed Jan 03 2001 - 09:23:07 EST


À 04:15 2001-01-03 -0800, John Cowan a écrit:
>On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Antoine Leca wrote:
>
> > I am a bit biased here, but I believe that spoken French is much less
> > weird than _written_ French is (is there many languages where spelling
> > contests is one of the most viewed TV programs?)

[John]
>Written French is indeed remote from spoken French, but on the other hand
>is much closer to the other written Romance languages. If French were
>written as spoken, hardly a word would be recognizable to
>speakers of Spanish, Italian, ... or even English. Since much of
>interlinguistic communication is in writing, this is significant.

[Alain] I fully agree with this view. And that is the reason why French
spelling has been conservative since 2/3 centuries (as Patrick said, before
it was much simpler, the written French was complexified voluntarily at
this time to make it closer to its Latin and Greek roots).

    I will be offline for the next three days.

Alain LaBonté
Québec

 
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