French Orthography: An Exception?

The question of whether French orthography is difficult to learn & use is addressed comparing several different writing systems & examining their underlying principles. A concise outline of the history of alphabets is given, & Chinese, Japanese, English, French, & Spanish scripts are compared. It is found that among its European counterparts, French orthography is based on the widest gap between morphology & script. Grapheme-phoneme correspondence, the gap between the pronunciation & writing of a word, & the phonetic & morphological principles on which script systems are built are discussed to show that a viable orthography must balance economy with efficiency. The role of cultural, political, & linguistic factors in the development of French orthography is noted, concluding that they all are responsible for its peculiarities today. It is argued that French orthography is difficult & an exception in the sense that it requires a great degree of grammatical competence by its users; it is like learning another language. The gap between oral & written morphology requires from its users a metalinguistic competence that exceeds knowledge of spoken French. 2 Tables, 11 References. Z. Dubiel