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More: French mistakes
More: French mistakes
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En tant que francophone, je peux vous dire que la confusion vient de la ressemblance avec le mot « épître », qui, lui, doit avoir un accent circonflexe, car cet accent remplace un « s », qu’on trouve dans la famille du mot : « épistolaire« et « épistolier ».
I think the mind goes to the word “champêtre”, et voilà le problème!
Peut-être le mot ressemble-t-il dans son orthographie au mot «huître» ?
Or simply due to the habit of writing “être” with an accent circonflexe, we lazily forget to omit it in “chapitre”.
The problem originates not from individual words that might influence spelling, but from the very widespread combination of a circumflexed vowel plus the ending -TRE in so very many words. The prior comments showed words like ÊTRE, CHAMPÊTRE, HUÎTRE, and ÉPÎTRE. Yet we can add many, many more: PRÊTRE, APÔTRE, PÂTRE, MARÂTRE, PARAÎTRE, VERDÂTRE, BELLÂTRE, MAÎTRE, TRAÎTRE, NÔTRE and VÔTRE, and so forth.
Furthermore, several of these words are connected to religion and thus to important (literary?) written materials–the epistles of the New Testament, the apostles, priests, etc. So it just “feels” like CHAPITRE (another word very commonly used in regard to the Bible) ought to get a circonflexe, too!
Very interesting. How many textbooks need revision.
Incroyable! Me too, I spell it wrong EVERY DAY. I teach it incorrectly too, apparently! No more, thanks to you – Merci beaucoup!
I’ve been thinking about this question for two days and I think I have some insight on this. Sometimes analogizing two words which not only carry the circonflexe over one of the vowels, but also have similar letter combinations can be a problem. I’ll give you an example. You have chatier- to punish or chastise, which takes the circonflexe, and then the noun chaton- kitten, which does not. And then another verb, tatonner, to grope, has the same -aton combination as chaton, but IT does take the circonflexe over the first a. So my point is that word analogy alone doesn’t help to reason out which word is accent circonflexe and which isn’t. One trick that DOES help and I think someone mentioned it, is to look at the context of the word to determine if it takes the accent. Tatonner takes the accent because it was once ‘tastonner’. You can think of ‘taste’ which is analogous to ‘feel’, and ‘feel’ is analogous to ‘grope’ as a way of remembering this.
Hope this helps. Kevin H.
Je suis tout à fait d’accord avec M. Paul Rivard. On est tenté d’ajouter un accent circonflèxe à cause d’une analogie avec le mot “épître.” Lorsque les mots riment, on a une tendance d’imiter non seulement l’orthographe mais aussi quel que sois l’accent que l’esprit fait associer avec le mot que l’on dans la tête. C’est un phénomène psychologique. On peut fait une association avec d’autres mots qui prennent un accent circonflèxe: champêtre, pêtre, hêtre, prêtre, être. –”être” comme terminaison n’est pas loin, par association d’idées avec, de –”itre.”
Edward PAOLELLA
Brooklyn, New York
Chapitre was in fact spelt by some writers in the Middle Ages as ‘chapistre’, as shown in the citations on this site:
http://www.dicocitations.com/citation_littre.php?mot=chapistre
Whether or not this was in any kind of common usage is, of course, another matter.
Here is the etymology of chapitre according to Le Grand Robert (2005):
1119, Ph. de Thaon, chapitle; du lat. capitulum « article de loi, chapitre d’un écrit », dimin. de caput « tête ».
ATILF gives a similar etymology.
However, a search for “chapistre” in the latter brings up this:
Quand Bernarz ot en sa reson Bien definee s’oroison Et apropie son chapistre [capitule, petite oraison]…
So to me, it appears that chapistre was a Latin and/or Old French word, but had nothing to do with chapitre.
I ve read all the comments an each one of them is so interesting and you can learn new things this way.
My opinion-with my limited french knowledge- is that the mind is confusing ‘chapitre’ with the Middle Ages, and the reason for that is the word château…
The accent should be on the ‘a’ though!
But this is easily explained by Loquamur comment.
Again, I m not sure, it s just an idea.
I swear I learned to spell this word with a circumflex when I originally learned it 30 years ago and I’m racking my brain to remember something about this. I attended a Catholic high school and the spelling variance may have something to do with the context of when or where the term was used. I seem to vaguely recall that when used in a religious connotation, the circonflexe was used. I’ll need to research this further…
I’m no expert on french pronounciation, but isn’t the ^ to make it pronounced like the letter e on it’s own, rather than like the i in pit for example.
If we think there was never an S in chapitre then that does explain why there is no circonflex.