The Shwa Alphabet for French	Contents
L'écriture Choix pour la langue française

I don't have to explain to you that French orthography is crazy - you learned that in school. In the words of the Grammaire du Français Contemporain; (Chevalier, Blanche-Benvenisse, Arrivé & Peytard; Larousse 1964,2002; §30):

«L'alphabet moderne français est composé de 26 lettres : a, b, c, d, e, f, g, h, i, j, k, l, m, n, o, p, q, r, s, t, u, v, w, x, y, z, empruntées au latin (sauf le w, d'origine germanique).

Ces lettres sont divisées en VOYELLES (a, e, i, o, u, y) et CONSONNES. Elles correspondent très imparfaitement aux sons. Ainsi, un même et unique son peut être transcrit très différement par un ou plusiers lettres: fil, philtre. Elle est surtout le cas pour les voyelles : eau, auto, pot, des os, les bœufs - graphie dite E dans l'O -, meuglent. Inversement, une même lettre ou un même groupe de lettres peuvent correspondre à des sons très différents : les poules couvent dans le couvent, la ville brille, ou même ne correspondre à aucun son : sculpteur; c'est le cas de beaucoup de consonnes finales : outil, estomac, porc, loup.

L'apprentissage de l'orthographe, c'est à dire d'un graphie correcte, est par là un exercice long et redoutable.»

To this sad recapitulation by an authority I might add the inconvenience posed by the profusion of accents in French, e.g. ç é à è ù â ê î ô û ë etc., and their absence from many fonts and keyboards. And yet many French people, having wasted years of school mastering the arcane art of French orthography, view its irrationality as a mark of distinction and regard any attempts to reform it with suspicion and disdain. Fortunately, history shows that after an initial period of resistance, the French adopt practical innovations enthusiastically, and no doubt will one day claim to have invented the Shwa alphabet in the first place!

As one would expect, the Shwa alphabet offers one letter for each sound of French. The principle behind Shwa is to keep the written language as close as possible to the spoken language. As a result, French in Shwa has many homonyms : words that are written differently in the Latin alphabet but alike in Shwa. But if French listeners can distinguish between "je l'ai fait cent fois" (I did it 100 times) and "je les fais sans foi" (I do them without faith) in speech, French readers can distinguish between them in writing.

Here are the vowels of French, with examples of their use :

And here are the consonants, also with examples:

Note that the Catch is used at the beginning of words to indicate that the word doesn't form liaison with the preceding word:

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?