On 01/08/06, Bogdan Butnaru <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
On 8/1/06, Chris Bransden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On 31/07/06, Bogdan Butnaru <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > Third, "the rules should be such that those who know the language are
> > able to capitalise correctly" does not define "correctly". In English
> > there is a _widely_ accepted standard for what "correct
> > capitalization" means,
>
> i'd strongly contest that! there's many - see
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization
You didn't read that page carefully enough
au contraire!
It enumerates
capitalization rules in general (like "I" or "February" should always
be capitalized). Also, it has a special section that enumerates
"conventions [...] used for capitalizing words in publication titles
and headlines, including chapter and section headings". It doesn't say
anything about song titles. There is exactly one reference to song
titles, an external link at the bottom of the page. (It doesn't seem
very authoritative, but as it happens, it has about the same rules as
we have.)
exactly! publication titles is essentially the same thing (a song
title is no different from a chapter title, really), and there is no
'standard' beyond the basic general rules for writing (but that's
different from capitalising - ie changing a sentence/phrase into a
heading/title). there is no single standard for capitalising in
english.
> if anything, sentence case is more popular these days, for english.
> not that i'd argue for us to change to that, mind, but it completely
> comes down to personal preference.
I really didn't notice that :)
http://news.bbc.co.uk/ is one notable user of sentence case, if anyone cares.
> right, so i think the fairest way to choose would be a vote.
> - only native/v good french speakers should vote (it's impossible to
> say what looks best if you aren't either)
No, it's not :)
in my experience most people just use what would look good in their
own language, which i don't think helps.
> - their vote should be on the aesthetic quality of the capitilsation,
> not the ease of application (as before, keeping it simple is easy, but
> if it looks crap then whats the point?)
Nothing prevents us from a trade-off. Remember, we do use the "standard" way
of English capitalization, _with simplifications_, and the
simplifications were chosen
specifically to make automatic capitalization possible.
I don't really contradict my previous argument: there is a standard
way of capitalizing English (everything capitalized, except
unimportant words), but there is indeed a lot of variation with
specific details (what are unimportant words: closed class,
prepositions, articles, etc.), and we chose among them one that's easy
to automatize.
well i guess i completely disagree! like i said, if anything sentence
case is the standard (and i believe there's some kind of push for it
to be recognised as such, although obviously there's no official
language group or anything like that to do such a thing, just
busybodies :P).
In a way, we could say the same thing about French: the standard way
is "capitalize only initial words", with a lot of variation about what
are initial words. We should chose the one that's easiest to
automatize, i.e. just the first one.
i find the argument as to which is most aesthitically desirable to be
much stronger. but if there were 2 competing standards with equal
support, and one was automatable and the other wasn't, then yeah it
could be the clincher, but only if the initial support for the
standards was based on aesthetic quality alone, IMO.
ultimately there are a lot of things in MBz which aren't
automated/automatable - that's why we are here, no?
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