[DNSOP] Writing rules for French (Was: draft-liman-tld-names-04

[Stephane Bortzmeyer <[e-mail]>]

[Side-issue, not really relevant for draft-liman-tld-names.]

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 01:00:10AM +0000,
 Richard Clayton <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 88 lines which said:

> >I already gave an example of capital form of 'c' with cedille is
> >often plain 'C' without cedille
> 
> That, as I understand it, is the convention in mainland France.

No, the rule is that composed characters are composed characters, in
upper case or in lower case.

At the time of the typewriters, there *was* a tendency to ignore
accents and cedillas on uppercase characters because it was impossible
to type them. Now that everyone uses word processor, accents on
uppercase characters are back (but not at 100 %).

Look in a second-hand bookshop: cheap books published between 1900 and
1990 often lack accents and cedillas in their titles. That was the
time of typewriters. (Expensive books were not affected.)

> ... I've no doubt that you can find erudite people in both France
> and Canada to discuss how formally specified these rules are.

Do note that not everyone follow the official rules, in the same way
that not every implementor or sysadmin follow the RFCs :-)

Today, many people, by laziness or ignorance, omit the accents and
cedillas on uppercase characters.

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 06:07:36PM -0500,
 Andrew Sullivan <[e-mail]> wrote 
 a message of 43 lines which said:

> In my opinion, Jefsey's understanding of how French works is not
> exactly in line with what l'Académie says, 

L'Académie Française <http://www.academie-francaise.fr/> is a bunch of
old and disconnected people so they have little influence on how to
actually write French, specially on the Internet. But, anyway, their
stand on composed uppercase characters is at
<http://www.academie-francaise.fr/langue/questions.html#accentuation>.