« De plusieurs minuties de l’orthographe » ou Les hésitations de l’Académie À propos du Dictionnaire historique de l’orthographe française

Nina Catach’s Dictionnaire historique de l’orthographe française (Larousse 1995) was published shortly after the great spelling controversy broke out in 1990. Her extremely ambitious and arduous work aims, in her own words, to provide a history of the spelling of the French lexicon, highlighting the various influences which led to words being spelt as they are today.
This dictionary with its network structure, published before the days of hypertext, systematically presents the successive choices and the unfinished reforms which resulted in inconsistent spellings such as lys/lis, ausculter but oreille, alezan but albâtre (which had been spelt alebastre), joaillier, poirier, groseillier but berger, pêcher (formerly spelt bergier, peschier), and irregularities in doubling consonants – consonance, consonantisme but consonne, sonore, sonorité but sonner, sonnette, sonnerie, which mirror changes in pronunciation, etc. In accounting for the large number of uncertainties (“hésitations”) in the Académie française’s own tradition of spelling, Nina Catach makes her book a wholly convincing argument for a reasoned modernisation of French spelling.
This article, which analyses and presents the way the DHOF works, is simply intended to pay homage to this lavish work.