From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Fri Oct 28 2005 - 01:52:33 CST
From: "William J Poser" <wjposer@ldc.upenn.edu>
> In the case of French, where this range has no established
> name, if one is not constrained to a close translation of
> the English name, one might take these facts into consideration.
> Leaving aside the problem of writing system typology, which
> has no solution since (a) the systems are probably not of
> homogeneous type and (b) there is no standard name for one
> of the types, one could recognize the fact that the range
> really contains multiple writing systems. My own preference
> for referring to this range in French would be to make
> "syllabaire" plural: "Syllabaires Autochtones Canadiens Unifies".
Add the missing required accents and it will be correct for French! Also the
titling capital style is incorrect for French (even if it is acceptable for
English, and if titlecase style is frequently used and abused in English
papers and softwares): French has much stronger rules than English about the
correct use of capital letters.
So:
- "Syllabaires autochtones canadiens unifiés"
(the first capital is allowed at the beginning of the expression only; note
that "canadiens" is an adjective here, so it has no capital in French as it
is not a proper name; if it was used as a common name for designating the
Canadian peoples, then it would also no longer be a proper name, and would
take no capital; the capital is only used in "Canada".)
- "Écriture syllabique"
(the capital is still required for the initial capital, but this capital
must be removed if this is not the begining of the sentence)
For normative references related to French, it is then recommanded to not
use any capital. The presence of the capital at the beginning of a sentence
should instead be infered, because there's no easy way to predict if one can
remove the capitalisation on a word starting by a capital letter.
So this should better be normatively referenced like in French dictionnary
entries as:
- "syllabaires autochtones canadiens unifiés"
- "écriture syllabique"
(both written without any capital letter, because "syllabaire" and
"écriture" are common names, not proper names which are invariable in
French)
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