Talk:Style/Language/French

Discussion about French capitalization standard

CapitalizationStandardFrench > French capitalization standard Discussion

Purpose

This page should hold all discussion about current issues with guidelines concerning French capitalization standard.

Please try to be constructive and only keep objective arguments here.

Related documents that should be read

• a discussion during summer 2006 titled Is french silly? :p (French capitalization rules)
• related pages on Wikipedia.fr: De l'usage des majuscules

Current issues

Current guidelines are not widely accepted, and in particular the exception 1.1 (or A.1 in the English translation).

In result CapitalizationStandardFrench is not fully applied and French data are not uniform: the capitalization may change from an artist (or a release) to another one.

Trends

The current trends are described below.

Option 1: Simplify current guidelines

Always use the sentence case and throw the exception. Note: this solution is already used in practice by some editors.

Rationale (= pros)

• The current guidelines are too complex and are difficult to understand.

Refusal (= cons)

• Rules are not so complex, this is the CapitalizationStandardFrench page that is really confusing and need some clean-up.

Option 2: Keep & extend current guidelines

Keep the current guidelines and add additional rules such as one for symmetry (in order to fix non aesthetic situation like Le Rouge et le noir or Le Cerf, le druide et le loup).

Rationale (= pros)

• The current guidelines match common practice with books and Wikipedia.
• Additional rules are needed to fix non aesthetic case.

Examples

This section should provide interesting examples and the result with both options.

Option 1	Option 2	Description/comment
Le rouge et le noir	Le Rouge et le Noir

In parallel: Improve the current CapitalizationStandardFrench page

• Remove duplicated sections (examples & references): it is not useful to have them twice, in French & in English
• Remove statement "(Don't use the former rules which cited Wikipedia as reference but use the exception as general rule)" :
  1. this statement is confusing (general rule for what?)
  2. according to your interpretation this statement could appear as wrong: the exception should currently always be applied in case of non verbal phrase with definitive articles
  3. we are not doing archeology: old reference should be removed after some times and it is actually more confusing than useful for new user

• Simplify rules: there's no need for a summary + detailed rules
  • rules need no be simple and straightforward: no rationale, no long comment (maybe in a different section or in references), no typographic jargon (that is the distinction between Majuscule and Capitale should be ignored)
  • compare with simplicity of other languages: CapitalizationStandard