Greetings, and apologies for being a little off-topic.
The Final Committee Draft of this standard is, like many ISO standards, in
both English and French. A colleague has made the following comments on it:
Is the column heading "Élément de donnée" correct?
We understand that in standard French capital letters
are not accented, contrary to the custom in some
French speaking countries other than France.
and:
In the column headed "Élément de donnée", the data items
corresponding to the codes 1 and 2 are given as "Masculin"
and "Féminin". In the English version they are correctly
given as "Male" and "Female". Is it not the case that
French maintains the same distinction between sex (of
living organisms) and gender (of words) as English does?
In that case, shouldn't the French words for "Male" and
"Female" be shown as "Mâle" and "Femelle", respectively?
This has raised two questions, on which you might be able to shed
some light:
1. Is the assumption that the French do not accent capitals
correct? I'm sure I've seen them accented, though I couldn't
possibly say this was consistent. If they're not accented,
this implies that round trip case folding loses information.
I note that this is indeed the case with MS Word97, in
Standard French, though Belgian, Canadian, Luxembourg and
Swiss French all fold to accented capitals!
2. A colleague shares my belief that a decision was made, not too
many years ago, to abolish the circumflex in French. Are we
correct? If there was such a decision, was it effective?
Mike Sykes.
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J M Sykes Email: Mike.Sykes@acm.org
97 Oakdale Drive
Heald Green
CHEADLE
Cheshire SK8 3SN
UK Tel: (44) 161 437 5413
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