Should we write “water lily” or “water lily”?
The word has not always had this spelling.
Let's look at literature... Proust wrote it with an “f”.
We can find it in his novel
On the side of Swann
, in this long passage where he describes the water lilies of the Vivonne:
"... such a water lily to whom the current through which it was placed in such an unfortunate way left so little rest except that like a mechanically operated ferry it approached a bank only to return to the one from which it had come, eternally repeating the double crossing.
Balzac, in his Comédie
humaine
, adopted this same spelling.
What happened to make us decide one day to write it with a “ph”?
To discover
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We have to go back to 1935, the year when the French Academy published the eighth edition of its dictionary.
For the first time, after two and a half centuries, the word "water lily" became "water lily", before returning to its initial spelling during the spelling corrections of 1990. Then followed the period nicknamed "water lily war" during which the press as well as some intellectuals attack these simplifications, published in the
Official Journal
of the French Republic on December 6.
“Nénufar with an f, ah the phumiers!”
, exclaims one of the characters of the cartoonist Siné.
However, the Academy reiterates that it did not
“wish to give an imperative character to these rectifications nor limit itself to a simple orthographic tolerance”
.
These are “recommendations”.
So much so that today, dictionaries like Larousse or Robert admit both spellings.
Also read: Is French spelling really (too) complicated?
Confusion with the word “water lilies”
And yet, the spelling of the word “water lily” is etymologically correct, as
Le Robert
specifies at the bottom of his article devoted to the word “water lily or water lily”.
Indeed, the other term with the spelling “ph” is due to a rumor circulating at the time, according to which the word came from Greek, the root of which included a “ph”.
The word "water lily", with the spelling "ph", is attested from the 13th century, according to its borrowing from medieval Latin.
In fact, Littré indicates that at the time, it was thought that the plant was from the same family as water lilies, from the ancient Greek “numphaia”, that is to say “nymph flower”.
Hence the spelling of “water lily” with a “ph”…
Today, we now know that the word “water lily” was borrowed, via Arabic, from the Persian “nilufar”.
As the
Historical Dictionary of the French Language
recalls , the Persian word was itself borrowed from the Sanskrit “nilautpala” for “blue lotus”, composed of “nila” that is to say “blue-black” and “ utpala”, “lotus flower”.
Although “water lily” is once again admitted by the French Academy and readopted into all dictionaries since 1990, the incorrect spelling of “water lily” still remains in use.