J M Sykes wrote:
> A colleague shares my belief that a decision was made, not too
> many years ago, to abolish the circumflex in French. Are we
> correct?
Not exactly.
Cf. <http://www.academie-francaise.fr/langue/orthographe/druon.html>:
| Apr�s avoir examin� cette question avec la plus grande rigueur
| et en m�me temps la plus grande prudence, il est apparu au Conseil
| sup�rieur qu'il convenait de conserver l'accent circonflexe sur la
| lettre a, e et o, mais qu'il ne serait plus obligatoire sur les
| lettres i et u, sauf dans les quelques cas o� il est utile : la
| terminaison verbale du pass� simple et du subjonctif imparfait et
| plus-que-parfait, et dans quelques cas d'homographie comme je�ne,
| m�r et s�r.
So, the accent circonflex is retained on �, �, and �, and
its use on � and � has been restricted.
> If there was such a decision, was it effective?
According to
<http://www.ids-mannheim.de/reform/Diskussionsbeitraege_kranz.html>,
the reform has been adopted in 1990/1991, and never has been of-
ficially retracted -- though the Acad�mie fran�aise has weakened
their own original position by recommending that the reform be not
effective at schools for an unspecified "time of probation".
Best wishes,
Otto Stolz
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.2 : Thu Nov 29 2001 - 08:47:09 EST