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Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

> French drops accents

Official position of both Académie française and Office québécois de la langue française is that accents must be preserved in capital letters. However, it is common in France to drop them, while they are almost always preserved in Québéc. I have heard that the reason is that European French keyboard layout makes it difficult to type accented capital letters, unlike Québécois French layout which makes writing them easy. But I am not sure if this is the cause rather than the effect of the practice.

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I confirm that in French capital letters should have accents.

I have an anecdote on this: on birth certificates, family names are written in capital letters. It turns out my partner name ends with a É which was written as E in her birth certificate. She never noticed (it had never prevented her to get national ID with her name properly accented) until we had our first kid which has both our names, and they refused to have the name accented until we had my partner's birth certificate updated (which as you can imagine is quite an adventure, since you need to dig ancient family birth certificates to prove it was originally written with an accent...).

French here, I recall my primary school textbook where they said something along the lines of "sometimes accents are dropped, that's sort of fine as long as it doesn't change the meaning". They gave the example of a fictitious newspaper whose headline was "UN POLICIER TUE": depending on the accent (tué/tue) it means either "a policeman kills" or "a policeman killed".

american here who's lived in france and still use an azerty keyboard because it lets me type in both languages. how do you get a capital A with an accent on an azerty keyboard?

Not the answer to your question, but this is why I think Quebec uses accented capitals more than France. In Canadian French layout, there is a key for à. Simply using Shift+à gives you À.

classic canada, fixing the keyboard. now all that's left is above 69.

korean is worse. they base off of 10k, not 1000. so a million is hundred ten_thousand. bagman. but as bad as that is, it's no 97 amirite.

Easily ? You don't, with the most common azerty keyboard you have to use : Ctrl+Alt+7 Shift+A. That's why there is a new standard for azerty keyboard the "NF Z 71-300" that is better with accent and stuff like æ,œ,Æ,Œ,«» etc.

Damn it. That's why I couldn't figure it out for years. You can't.. Is the new keyboard standard being used anywhere? Like if I walk into a common office in france and sit down at a laptop - is it likely to be using the new keyboard layout?

What's weird is I sometimes, even 10 years ago, would get an email from people in France, and it would have an accented A. Like, how did they do that..

i know that LDLC is selling one of these [1] ... and that's it, i don't even think it's coming to laptop anytime soon.

[1] https://www.ldlc.com/fiche/PB00279741.html

Interesting that I was wrong - another data point in the "it's more complicated than you think it is" column. I always thought you were supposed to drop them (because I was explicitly told so by a French engineer I worked with in the 90s, talking about one particular poster, and many years later still assume that one hallway conversation was enough to make that THE OFFICIAL RULE without bothering to actually check...)

It’s been a pet peeve of mine for quite a while, and an urban legend for quite a lot more. It was tolerated when all we had was typewriters (and even then you were supposed to add them, but it was cumbersome).

Wrongly dropping accents on uppercase letters predates computer keyboards; the French azerty layout puts accented letters on the first level of number row:

http://j.poitou.free.fr/pro/img/tkn/tw-image.jpg

This idiocy carried over. The recent layout update makes dead accents more accessible:

https://norme-azerty.fr/

But I haven't seen much adoption yet.

That button to the right of the P that contains four different forms of dashes is... interesting.

Even more if you consider that the minus sign there is not the character - that is used by every programming language.

> That button to the right of the P that contains four different forms of dashes is... interesting.

And there are two more on the 8 key.

I like the mac international keyboard layout, but it still only provides for 4 of those: the non-breaking hyphen and the "proper" minus sign are lacking.

I like that the "new azerty" provides for pretty much every diacritic, even those which are not in use in french.

I blame the horrendous default settings of MS Word and Outlook for this, and the maddeningly convoluted way to enter accented caps on Windows. There is no context in which it is correct to omit accents in French, caps or otherwise.

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