From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Sep 16 2005 - 14:32:37 CDT
From: "Peter Kirk" <peterkirk@qaya.org>
> not in France, and there are different accentuation rules in Canada.
Can you comment this last assertion?
(1) If you speak about the "optional" accents on capitals, you should know
that this is just a technical issue in France with French keyboards that
required *accepting* capitals without accents, so they became non-mandatory.
But for the Académie Française, and all French linguists, and in serious
books like dictionnaries, the accents have always been present, and are
required.
This issue does not apply to Canada, because of its enhanced standard
keyboard, that has more dead keys allowing easy input of those uppercase
letters with diacritics. So enhanced keyboards have also been developed in
France too, as compatible extensions of the existing keyboard, but they have
still not been adopted with standardized layout
I think it's particularly unfortunate that AFNOR did not publish at least a
guideline for the layout of additional dead keys on French keyboard, even if
this was only a recommandation and not a madatory standard for keyboard
providers; such a recommandation would have been in use rapidly however: see
how fast the keyboards have been modified to include the Euro symbol, or the
additional 3 keys for Windows... And competitors would have still been able
to add supplementary keys to facilitate the input of some characters, such
as the separate Euro key found on Acer notebooks, as they have already done
for "multimedia" and Internet function keys.
(2) if you speak about sort order, then I can't see a difference between
French French and Canadian French: both sort accents in backwards order at
the secondary level.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Sep 16 2005 - 14:35:28 CDT