In future the French can go for a picnic, not a pique-nique. While doing so, they can choose to eat an ognon, not an oignon, reports The Independent.
And if they write a postcard – or more likely send a text message – they don’t need to place quite as many little hats on their “i’s” and “u’s” as they once did.
A decision to implement a 26-year-old, very modest and non-compulsory reform of the spelling rules of the French language has caused an uproar in France.
he circumflex – the accent which looks like an old Chinese hat – was being abolished! By edict of the education ministry, the spelling of hundreds of words was being changed overnight!
Little of this, it turned out, was true. The circumflex will remain on its most common habitat, the “e” and the “a”. It can however, in some words, be left off an “i” or a “u”.
A few words such as picnic and ognon will have these simpler alternative spellings, but the old ones will also remain acceptable. A total of 2,400 words are affected.
All of this was agreed by the Académie Française, the 350-year-old watch-dog of the French language, in 1990. For reasons no one can quite explain, publishers have now included them in school text books for the first time.
Why the outrage? It began with a perfectly accurate story on the website of the French television station, TF1. By the time that it had been spun and woven by social media, the circumflex was to be “abolished” overnight. Slogans appeared on Twitter and Facebook which proclaimed “Je suis circumflex” instead of “Je suis Charlie”.