If you consider that today all end up being a question of money, you can notice that the French bank notes (soon to be extinct) use uppercase accented letters (e.g. "FALSIFIÉ" in the "do-not-copy-me" notice ). Yet, as it was previously noted, a great deal of confusion still exist today in France regarding accents & uppercase.
An illustration can be found in "Le Monde" (one of the most respected French newspaper): in www.lemonde.fr there is no accent on uppercase letters on the front page. Yet, within the site some articles make use of uppercase accented letters (e.g. "DÉBUT JUILLET 1995, ..."). In another French newspaper (www.liberation.com) , the same inconsistencies can be noticed as accents are used for the menus (e.g. "MULTIMÉDIA") but not for the headers (e.g. "Economie"). An explanation could that computers were used in some occurences to change the casing making it "right". Indeed typing uppercase capitalized letter is a bit trickier than typing their lowercase counterpart (e.g. SHIFT + "é" gives you a "2"...), which may explain the low usage today. (You can see the French keyboard layout at http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/keyboards/keyboards.asp) For those who need some statistics may be you could survey the web for the various usage for the name "États-Unis" (= United States). Both Le Monde and Libération use "Etat-Unis" despite what the dictionnaries say. I found a bibliography in French on the subject of "uppercase & accents" but I do not own any of the book mentionned so I could not verify what they say (http://www.ccdmd.qc.ca/Sitedocu/f0020076.htm). To comment on a previous remarks made in the thread: > Alain LaBonté wrote: > it is true that there has always been a usage for unaccented uppercase > initials of sentences (or proper names), on both sides of the Atlantic > indeed, and for consistent accentuation, regardless of case. While I'm not disagreing with the previous comment, we can note that on www.larouse.net, accents are used even on the first letter of the sentences (e.g. "À la fois plate-forme de diffusion...."). I could not find any documentation confirming/restricting such a use. I don't even want to think on how such a usage could be computerized :). Cheers, Thierry. <><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><> www.i18ngurus.com - Open Internationalization Resources Directory
