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

[Mangled]

> Personally I much prefer standard sentence case because it's much simpler

Being "simpler" doesn't make it "good", or even "better".
Argument discarded, says the prosecutor :D

> [1] to use and is more consistent; capitalising half of the sentence and not the other half

The so-called "exceptions" do not apply to sentences, but only to non
verbal phrases.

> looks really strange to me

So I guess you are not very familiar with french books (which is not a
problem, and is perfectly understandable given you're not a native).

To me, it looks perfectly natural.

> and I don't understand why
> 'le' makes words capitalised and not 'un'.

Because definite articles are not indefinite articles.

> Furthermore, I don't recall
> seeing any new add release edits where the capitalisation was correct by
> our current guidelines

Me neither, as I don't enter french releases, and I don't vote a lot.
Still, I know I fixed quite a few, and I know there are other
moderators actually fixing them.

Again, to me, the fact some/most people don't read/understand/follow
guidelines doesn't proove these rules are essentially wrong.

> -- the vast majority seem to be either sentence case
> or English-style most/every word capitalised.

I would say most of them are entered English-style, and 90% of the
time are simply murdered (accents are the first victim).

> Also, because of its
> complexity,

Once again: I don't see any complexity in them, and everybody I asked
(including these wanting to remove them) perfectly understand them.
So I think this point is moot: they are *not* complex.

> we can't develop a guess case mode for it.

Who says that? Keschte? (*ping* Keschte)
And no, it's not because of its (supposed) complexity, but because
Guess Case doesn't understand grammar.
The fact computer are bad at dealing with grammar (or semantic) is not
an argument IMO.

There are a lot of things computers are bad at doing.

That's why we need human editors.

>
> --Nikki, who isn't a native French speaker and also still doesn't
> understand when to capitalise words in French.

Don't cap if it's a verbal phrase.
If it match one of the two simple schemes, and you can identify
grammar function of the words, just cap'em ;)

Oh, well, forget about it - just drop me a mail when you need some :p

>
> 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.

Mmmm, so I guess the next victim will be german? hey, Shep! ;)

- Olivier