Re: [mb-style] Is french silly? :p (French capitalization rules)

Nikki writes:

>1: Out of our 25 capitalisation standards, 19 are normal sentence case
>(i.e. first letter and all proper nouns capitalised), 4 are every word
>capitalised except for a short list of conjunctions etc. and just French
>and German are complex enough to require the editor to understand the
>language.
>

This is an interesting statistic.  I wonder if the prevalence of
"Sentence case" in different languages, and the possibility of a bias
for people to prefer the capitalization of their native language, may be
the motivation for "simplification" here.

The "simplicity" of the sentence case standard makes we wonder whether
it might be possible to find a technological solution to this problem
that makes more people happy.  If it weren't for the pesky problem with
proper nouns, it would be possible to implement a user preference for
"Sentence capitalization always" - which would force all titles into
Sentence capitalization for tagging and (non-editable) display.  This
might reduce the clamor by people who find unfamiliar capitalization
standards confusing, but could cause more problems than it solves, as it
would create an invisible division in the community.  People who
selected that preference might blithely add titles in sentence case
regardless of the appropriate language standard; disabling the forced
Sentence caps in editable fields is an attempt to prevent that kind of
behavior, but it would be an incomplete solution.

At any rate, the pretty-much-insoluble problem of proper nouns makes
this impractical, although it might be worthwhile to have a TaggerScript
option for this (especially if a file with a user-provided list of
proper nouns were an option).  (Acronyms and other words with more than
one capital letter would be considered as proper nouns implicitly).

For the record, my personal preference is for the current French
capitalization standard; although despite my name I'm not a native
French speaker.  I can even understand the distinction between the
behavior for definite and indefinite articles, since the former are more
specific; they are accordingly a step or two closer to the specificity
of a proper nouns, which seem to be worthy capitalization in every
language that has such a concept.  And the capitalization of initial
noun phrases is not so dissimilar from the German rule of capitalizing
Nouns.

@alex


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