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

[Bogdan Butnaru]

I'm curious, where did the the idea of the exceptions came from?

It seems rather strange to me, especially the fact that they apply
even if the title contains other words. For example "The Highly
Unbelievable Story of anything else" would look very weird, even in
French. I could see the point of "The Story of some imaginary title"
or "The Wondorous Story", though I don't see why "An incredible story"
would be different.

In the interest of consistency and uniformity I'd drop all exceptions.
But I'd still want to know what's their origin.

-- 
Bogdan Butnaru — bogdanb at gmail.com
"I think I am a fallen star, I should wish on myself." – O.


On 7/26/06, Mangled <viapanda at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi!
>
> MLL recently opened-up the can of worms again :p, so I guess it's a
> good time to sort it out.
> It was a bit messy and I guess I wasn't specially kind myself, given I
> first thought MLL was simply trying to override styleguide to his own
> tastes, which he definitely wasn't.
> No hard feelings MLL? ;)
>
> So, I'm taking on the hassle to try to sum up here what has been said,
> and what could be done.
>
> First, for these not really familiar with it:
> a) French capitalization simply follows sentence mode cap: only the
> first letter of the sentence is capped (and the first letter of proper
> nouns of course).
> b) In the case the title *is not* a verbal phrase and matches one of
> the two following schemes, we cap all the words of the scheme:
> "adjective noun"
> "definite article, [[adverb], adjective], noun"  ([] denotes an
> optional element in the scheme).
>
>
> MLL (and others) propose to discard b), and just stick with sentence
> mode cap for every case (but artist intent).
>
> Arguments are:
> a - the "exceptions" are complex to understand
> b - ambiguous
> c - counter-intuitive
> d - silly
> e - most people don't use them, as they don't understand them
> f - there has been some discussion at wikipedia about them, so they
> are not really a consensus
>
>
> It's a known fact I feel strongly again that removal proposition :D,
> so I won't state my arguments right now, but rather wait and give a
> chance to MLL (or others) to precise their point more specifically if
> I didn't sum it properly.
>
> Regards,
>
> - Olivier (a.k.a. dmppanda)