{~} /the problem with French

"What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object?"

as a natively bilingual speaker of both French and English, i have at length oscillated between using french and english to write.

on one hand, french is the language I speak daily in meatspace, the one i encounter eavesdropping and reading street signs, in
university and at the dinner table. It is a very fastuous language that maintains its legitimacy through an appeal to ancience,
held up by the sheer longevity. It is, as a cultural institution, as an immobile system, as a linguistic fiat currency, too big to fail.

on the other hand, its static quality should not be credited to a theoretical perfection or status as the nec plus ultra of linguistic
efficacy. More responsible for this outwardly venerable stability is the profoundly institutional nature of the French language ;
I use "institutional" in a 20th-century sense, as a social control apparatus which regulates and (dis)empowers certain acts of communication.
The French language is one of two cases I know of in world history of an a posteriori constructed (or "planned") language being
successfully introduced as not just an academic or legal language but a language ubiquitous in everyday life, becoming the single
means of oral and written communication (and hence, communicable thought) for the many millions of monolingual Modern French speakers.
The other case is the Israeli language, which was developed as a means to homogenize (or at least emulsify) the ethnically,
linguistically and culturally varied Jewish peoples who, as prospective Israeli citizens, were to take part in the nation-building
project of Israel.

a short, non-contractual history of "French"

Such a political motive was also at the inception of the elaboration of a single French language : the peoples of what is now northern France
used to speak vastly different dialects of Germanic-influenced "langues d'oïl" (Picard, Normand, Burgundian) in the north, while southern peoples in Provence and
Gascony spoke more faithfully Romance languages, "langues d'oc", aka Occitan. these patois were deeply in relation with the geography, history,
and attitude of the peoples who spoke them, and formed a linguistic continuum as diverse as the landscapes which France now encompasses.
as a result, mutual intelligibility decreased as distance between speakers increased, which limited the spread both of information
and merchandise. this happened at a time when feudalism was on the way out in the Kingdom of France, and power was beginning to
be centralized in what was then called France itself, now Île-de-France : the Paris region, where king Francis I concentrated seigneurial powers
and sought to establish a culturally united nation under parisian rule. one efficient way of achieving this was the establishment of a single,
standard language, to be used in all legal and political spheres : this standard language, which was made the single official language of France
in 1539, is the not-so-distant ancestor of what is now called modern french. It united institutions under a common protocol and led to the
far-reaching centralization of various forms of influence, which is still causing problems today (look at a map of railroads in France
and it's immediately apparent how inefficient the system is if you're trying to go from one provincial city to another).

The biggest blow to linguistic diversity in France may have been the decision to teach standardized French in schools. In 1889, a bill was
passed under the third republic enacting universal, free, public, secular education for all children. this fundamental law in French history
led to an explosion in the proportion of young boys and girls learning to read and write. but for all its advantages, the law led to
the near-total eradication of non-standard varieties of French, by prescribing standard French as the language children were to be taught
to read and write. This could be explained both by an uncharitably presumed ambition by the ministry of "national education" to eradicate
the cultural and linguistic diversity of the various provinces to advance France's unending identitarian nation-building quest, and by
the more pragmatic explanation that standard French (a language of distinction, culture, and academia) was the only form of French which
had been given a specific set of rules, a fixed grammar and orthography. At any rate, the children who were massively taught to write Standard
French could only speak their local dialects, but not record them; when soldiers in the first world war wrote home, they wrote in Standard French.
within three generations, local distinctions had been eroded, specific vocabulary and nuances in meaning had been lost to a high degree, and kids grew up
in Standard French-speaking households, albeit with some variation in the kinds of slang and colloqualisms they used.

what's so weird about French

[orthography]
one of the most outstanding particularities of French is its very very unintuitive orthography: spelling has hardly budged (except for the
comically publicized respellings of "éléphant" and "nénuphar" to "éléfant" and "nénufar") in hundreds of years, bin part because the institution
which decides how words are spelled, the Académie française, is highly conservative and prescriptive, and so while words have evolved in pronunciation,
they are still spelled the same. This is particularly evident with verbs, where distinctions used to be made phonemically between forms such as

aller (to go: infinitive)
allé (past participle)
allais (imperfect 1ps/2ps)
allai (simple past 1ps)
allez (present 2pp)
allait (imperfect 3ps)
allaient (imperfect 3pp)

which are now homophones. This is, obviously, hell for French learners, and it's remarkable once you've seen this how simple the english verb paradigm is:
english stopped using "lovest" and "loveth" and, when speakers dropped the /st/ and /θ/, they were no longer written or changed : "you love", "she loves".

another brutal example: /o/ can be written:

au "at the (masculine)"
eau "water"
eaux "waters"
aux "at the (masculine plural)"

[loanwords, hellenicisms, latinisms]

[frozen grammar]

erosion and the académie

[spelling lacunae]
[forlorn tenses]

where to?

[spelling]
it's indubitable French spelling and orthography is going to change radically. I have tried to put into use in attempts at composition
in modern French a whimsical orthography of my conception which just represents sounds phonemically. Looking at spelling errors made by French speakers,
it seems accents are often dropped by sloth, and so it's unlikely nasal vowels would be represented with accents like I've done here.

[verb forms]

[register]
I think it's long overdue to fully adopt the low register of speech for poetry. convoluted and polite grammar has done its time in my opinion;
I

works in low register

A short song in an adapted low register (phonemic spelling):

TOURNE, TOURNE, PETIT MOULÊ (Tourne, tourne, petit moulin)

Léz'éolièn sâ fê (Les éoliennes sans fin)
êlasable tourn, biê (Inlassables tournent, bien)
cèl ne tourne pour riê. (Qu'elles ne tournent pour rien.)

The wind turbines endlessly turn, though they turn for nothing.

Gardâ la tète ot, (Gardant la tête haute)
tourné toujour parèi, (Tournées toujours pareil)
èl tourne mèm sâ vâ ; (Elles tournent même sans vent)

Holding their head high, always facing the same direction, they turn even without wind;

Sâ doné'd courâ, (Sans donner de courant)
sâ fil pour l'âporté, (Sans fil pour l'emporter)
plu com oparavâ, (Plus comme auparavant)

Without producing current, nor power line to carry it, unlike in older times,

Sa tourn oè mè âfê (Ça tourne, ouais, mais enfin)
léz'éolièn sav biê (Les éoliennes savent bien)
c'èl ne tourne pour riê. (Qu'elles ne tournent pour rien.)