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Battle lines drawn in France's spelling wars. «As millions of French children file back to class for the new school year, Francois de Closets, a prominent writer, journalist and TV presenter, decided to admit his shortcomings in a pamphlet called "Zero Mistakes." "Lots of countries have problems with their spelling. What makes France different is that we have elevated spelling to the status of a cult," he told AFP. "People who can't spell are stigmatised." »
There are really two issues, one too complex to resolve easily: words that have tricky spelling in the root; words that have tricky spelling in the grammatical ending (and at the ending's junction with the root). A lot of French spelling errors are found in sound-alike grammatical endings. The misspelled word is a properly spelled word, but the ending is incorrect for the grammatical context. Like the Its It's, There Their They're, and the To Too Two (see the first sentence of this post) it would be difficult to perform an automated check of the French grammatical endings. Those that I've used in English get it wrong quite a bit.
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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