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 LaBont�
Qu�bec
