As english took over the world, french is still the learning language in many african countries where natality rates may enables anyone making any projections about the dominant "lingua franca" in the future, a debate not closed yet...

It seems that Mandarin Chinese will be the next lingua franca anyways. Europe's domination of the world is almost coming to an end. I do love French though. J'aime le lingue francais!

No but we do have rough, cough and bough.

reform = reshaping .... just like the protestants wanted the then-catholic faith reformed.

 

Well it's a lot to do with LBGT activists (especially the trans-genre) and the male/female genre nature of French (I suppose Spanish & Italian also have a problem that way). Unlike Germanic languages, you don't have a neutral genre (it) in Latin languages, and every word is preceded either by either le/un or la/une in French.

 

Another point is the masculine domination grammatical rule is that if you talk of 500 women and one man, the academy has enforced for centuries that you talk of them "ils", while if you have 20 men and one woman, it doesn't become "elles"

 

It's also a lot to do with finding the feminine to professions :

-some go naturally postier > postière),

-others are neutral (le or la ministre)

-others you have to create: auteur was often transformed to auteure (the québécois initiated that 50 years ago), but to most feminist decide today that it is not clear or audible enough and want to have "autrice" enforced, because its plainly audible ... Some peeved and fed-up males then say "autiste"

 

it can really become a headache when you write to many as "chèr(e)s XYZ: this was accepted for centuries, but now many women feel that the parentheses for the "e" (addressed to women) are diminishing women, and so we may have to write in the coming future "chèr.e.s" as you would have done with auteur(e)s becoming auteur.e.s if you have it the Québec way.

But since of the audition of auteure is not strong enough, you may have to write "chèrs auteurs et chères autrices"...

 

So you can imagine that every time you speak of doctors or police agents , this will dramatically increase the length of your letter and make it difficult to decipher

This is a fine statement about the contemporary issues , concerning the feminisation of terms in our mother tongue, this being said by a former quebecois to another one. As long as you consider that the initial question on this post had that issue in sight! I can't miss your opening statement  refering to religious wars of days long gone  as this is almost turning to modern schism. 

As ever , right on the spot Mr Chantraine, from a silent follower, for years on Prog Archives, and hopefully as long in the future.

Anyways, even if historically it's been the case, I think French is about one of the worst choices for a lingua franca. As a native francophone speaker, I can't stress enough how big of a pain French grammar is. Don't forget the songs you learned in little school listing the dozens of exceptions to every damned grammatical rule or else you're pretty much f**ked. Keep it to English, the easiest language to learn I'd say.

But in the end i will always think that french allows you more "pump and circonstance"...

^ That's possible but it's hard for me to judge. Still I'd think that Hebrew, Arabic, Slavic and Scandinavian languages are more challenging in pronunciation. Of course it all depends on one's native language.

 

Brace yourself young man.

 

BTW, I was more of an "on-était-rien" Ontarian than one from La Belle Province

 

Blaqua wrote: " As a native francophone speaker, I can't stress enough how big of a pain French grammar is."  I don't think the problem lies in the grammar, despite its peculiarities and exceptions, a feature shared with English. It lies in the challenging pronunciation of French, the language's frequent nasal and rounded vowels.