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

[Nikki]

On Fri, Jul 28, 2006 at 01:35:51PM +0200, Thomas Tholén wrote:
> Any one of those will work I suppose. There's not really much meaning to have
> caps rules that works for people having no clue whatsoever about the language
> in question. They wouldn't even know which words are names, so they couldn't
> ever do anything better that just blindly guess anyway.

Well, it's not black and white! There are people like me who know some
French. In Britain, a lot of people do French in school. They probably
understand a little bit and can perhaps pick out names, but they wouldn't
have a good grasp on the grammar. Sentence case wouldn't be difficult,
although they might accidentally miss some of the names, but the current
guidelines would be too hard. While non-native speakers can fairly
confidently use sentence case, they can't, assuming they understand them in
the first place, use the current guidelines with anywhere near as much
confidence.

I'm not trying to say that we should write guidelines in favour of
non-native speakers, but the current guidelines have been like that for
ages and still hardly anyone uses them. On the other hand, plenty of
people, French or not, are using sentence case.

--Nikki