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Re: Une Question

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 10, 2004, 20:04
En réponse à Chris Palmer :


>Until you get used to it, French prose with dialogue can be very hard to >follow. The punctuation reminds me of early modern English spelling. I >recently read Ben Franklin's autobiography, so the pain is recent. :)
I fail to see how French prose with dialogue can be difficult to follow. If anything, the French mark for dialogue (the quad -) is *much* more obvious than the way English prose marks dialogue (with a nearly invisible quote), so in French the narrative and the dialogue are much easier to separate than in English. ____________________________________________________________________________ En réponse à Remi Villatel :
>I disagree with what I've read here.
Doesn't make you right.
> Even Christophe seems to have forgotten >his natlang because what he wrote is ungrammatical; at least, it's not a >sentence.
Please point to me where I have been ungrammatical in French, since I *haven't* put a single French sentence in the thread you're responding too. The closest I did was English with French punctuation, as I learned it. English is *not* ungrammatical French, despite what many French people might believe. So next time you insult me like that, please refer to something real.
>U+00AB = « (<<) >U+00BB = » (>>) > >U+201C = “ (``) chr(147) in win-1252 >U+201D = ” ('') chr(148) in win-1252 > >(Unicode rules! If you can't read the chars, it's your fault. Change your >mail client!) ;-)
No, it's yours: the Listserv is not Unicode-friendly, and Unicode will very easily get mangled. ASCII plain text is the only secure thing in mail. And it's gonna stay that way for years to come, whether you like it or not. You know, forcing people to change their mail client (I can't. The one I use is the only one secure enough for the moment) is *not* a good way to handle things. If anything, people will dislike your attitude and may even dislike Unicode because of it.
>Whatever... And the “double quotes” are used to quote inside a « military >stripes quotation » if needed. According to the rules of typography I've >learnt a long time ago, your sentence must look like: > >Lorsque notre professeur nous a dit « César a dit : “Veni, vidi, >vici.” », >j'ai été complètement époustouflé. > >When our teacher told us « Caesar said : “Veni, vidi, vici.” », I was >utterly flabbergasted.
I've seen both simple and double quotes in official papers, but the rules *I* learned said that double quotes were monsters imposed on us by anglo-saxon computers, i.e. they weren't originally part of the French punctuation. So maybe you disagree but what I learned at school doesn't fit your views. And I have no reason to consider my school was wrong... Christophe Grandsire. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr You need a straight mind to invent a twisted conlang.

Replies

Philippe Caquant <herodote92@...>
Remi Villatel <maxilys@...>