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.
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