Every day she is scratched, damaged, abused.
What has the French language done to us to deserve this?
Is this due to its exceptions?
its complexities and subtleties?
to his proverb "who loves well, punishes well"?
In their book
Notre Grammaire est sexy
, (Stock), Laure de Chantal, normalienne and Xavier Mauduit, producer on France Culture for
The Course of History
, give back the taste for French.
They tell us about the sensuality of the rhymes embraced, the suavity of the accents and the eroticism of the points of suspension ... Neither purists nor lax, these two lovers of French offer a poetic, playful and historical journey in the arcana of language.
LE FIGARO.
- You are an associate of classical letters, Xavier Mauduit, producer and columnist.
What do you think of the French language?
Laure DE CHANTAL.
-
Xavier Mauduit and I are lovers of the language, in its historical or literary scope.
It always thrills us to discover the origin of words and to see the stories behind them.
We are each from a generation where children were already not so good at French and spelling.
If we have learned our grammar and conjugation rules well, it is clear that over time we are sometimes not so sure.
So we said to ourselves that we had to refresh all these achievements.
However, if we manage to learn lessons by heart when we are a student, as we grow older, it becomes more complicated.
As adults, we need narration or an explanation more to memorize lessons.
We need to be told stories and that's good because the French language is full of them!
This is what we did with our book.
It is for this reason that it is not a scholar's book, but a language lover's book.
It is aimed at readers who are neither specialists nor schools.
It's daring all the same to want to make grammar “sexy”, this pet peeve of every French person…
She is a terror but also a happiness!
It's like everything, when something is too easy, we get tired of it.
That's why, even if it scares us, we always come back to it.
Remember, as we were proud to have a good mark in dictation or grammar, that made this good result all the more enjoyable.
He was the holy of holies.
We felt much more courageous.
And it's the same today when there is no fault.
“As we are very often afraid of making mistakes, we copy ready-made sentences.
It's a shame because it wears out the tongue.
This makes it a dead language ”
Yet everyone makes mistakes, even more over time ...
One of the peculiarities of French is that this language values history, so it functions in historical layers.
Our language carries with it all our heritage from the edicts of Villers-Cotterêts to the present day.
It is a treasure for eternity which is given to us.
Obviously, the grammar is very complicated.
It is a historical logic, human and not, mathematics.
So if we make mistakes, at the same time, it's an opportunity to learn from our mistakes.
Grammar allows constant learning, as in a romantic relationship where there are always surprises and things to understand or relearn otherwise love dies.
There is, I believe, a virtue in the difficulty of our language.
It is important to know what mistakes you are making.
These are sometimes revealing of our history, our school life and our attention to certain things in the world.
Because the complexity of French forces us to make mistakes, we hide behind ready-made formulas, to avoid them.
So, you say, "we are making the French language a dead language".
Indeed, as we are very often afraid of making mistakes, we copy ready-made sentences, which are not ours.
It's a shame because it wears out the tongue.
This makes it a dead language.
Worse, it wears out thought: we are beings of words.
Our language allows us to think and formulate everything we feel.
The less subtleties we have in the words we learn and use, the less our thinking will be rich.
You have to listen to new words and words you don't know.
What then to think of these formulas "I will come back to you", "climb on", "wait for a return" ...?
It impoverishes the language.
There is abuse of language when we put adverbs all the time, whereas the adverb, as its name suggests, first modifies the verb and not the adjective.
There may be mistakes to correct when repeating ready-made expressions: "You are not without ignoring."
This distorts the subject until sometimes saying the opposite of what we wanted!
"We need to keep the story in the words and that's why we were so reluctant to accept the slightest change in spelling"
Is language proficiency an instrument of power?
An instrument of power control and a political instrument.
In France, the language is political.
Previously, we liked big speeches, today, it's small sentences, but it is a fact: our language is a political instrument of predilection, evidenced by the creation of the French Academy by the royal power.
This aspect can be seen today in the debates around the feminization of names, titles, ranks and professions.
There is a political struggle to be waged through words and usage.
Now, what is usage?
These are the people, the greatest number.
From the moment when the majority feels that certain words must be feminized - that readers, for example, read authors, while respecting the genius of the language - it is up to the language to adapt.
The French language we speak is ultimately very recent ...
We are in a historical phenomenon.
The less the language is fixed, the more there are living sources.
One can regret the impoverishment of the vocabulary even if I note that each generation has its own words.
On the other hand, concerning the use and the conception of times, there is something to wonder or even worry about.
If we have, at the beginning, more nuances to speak of the past than of the future, today, that tends to wither.
We tend to put everything either in the past tense or in the imperfect, while for the times French has a beautiful palette of subtleties, which are a revealing of our way of seeing the world.
Without these nuances, what is left?
But this disappearance is not new ...
We are on a large scale phenomenon.
Have you ever wondered why this past was called "simple"?
This is because it was the most used oral time a few centuries ago.
It was a spoken past and then it moved to the written word, then to the historical narrative and finally, to the literary writing.
From now on, it is in the process of disappearance: the simple past passed to put it in a play on words.
Its strangeness for us comes precisely from the fact that it has been widely used orally.
Like the things we use a lot, we distort them.
This is why it seems to us today so irregular and therefore so complicated.
"Language is the magic of the useless which is essential: let's not forget that" grimoire "and" grammar "have the same origin"
You say that it is easier to change government than rules in the French language.
How to explain it?
By intuition that to lose a state of language is to lose part of our history, to risk distorting an already unstable equilibrium.
French is very attached to the idea of an exceptional linguistic heritage, born from the intermingling of so many cultures.
We need to keep the story in the words and that is why we were so reluctant to accept even the slightest spelling change.
Currently, there is a proposal to reform the learning of French through Latin, from the 6th grade.
I find that very good and even fundamental.
There are lots of spelling problems that can be solved thanks to etymology and therefore to a large extent thanks to Latin.
Not to mention that Latin also helps structure thinking and understand many of our grammar rules.
This generation will be able to make progress in spelling but also in expressions.
In the book we mention many of these little Latin people (and some Greeks) who populate our dictionaries, Cupid, Adonis, Caesar etc.
This playful aspect is constitutive of your book ...
We are both incorrigible lovers of humor and puns: it was inconceivable for us to write without a smile, especially for a book on the language!
We wanted to highlight the playful aspect of grammar, which is what makes it so sexy to listen and speak.
Consider that the three points of suspension were invented by and for erotic literature.
We put the first letter and the three points to avoid writing words considered shameless.
In short, with this book, you are setting yourself up against a language, all too often reduced to a tool.
Language is the magic of the useless that is essential: let us not forget that “grimoire” and “grammar” have the same origin.
Grammar is the backdrop for our thinking.
To stay within the metaphor, it is not a tool but a toolbox, even a treasure chest: it is a tool for communicating, for thinking, it is also a tool for creating, seducing, reading and listening.
This accumulation of rules from history and framed by the Academy also means that we can read so many authors from the past.
It is not necessary to infringe its particularity, but on the contrary to transmit it to the greatest number.
You have to decorate the language.
When you are an adult, it is sometimes good to become a little child again in order to "play and learn", that is to say to educate.
You have to take time to understand your language and enrich it, every day as in a beautiful and long love story.