Re: The importance of combining characters (was: French Justice against Catalan personal names)

From: John Cowan (jcowan@reutershealth.com)
Date: Thu Aug 08 2002 - 07:43:48 EDT


Doug Ewell scripsit:

> I'm guessing that this is some sort of joke. If a French court is
> really still using the French Republican Calendar, dating edicts from
> the 2nd of T(h)ermidor of whatever year, then it can hardly come as a
> surprise that it forbids little Martí from keeping his acute accent.

AFAIK when the French Republican calendar was abolished in 1806, this
did not mean that every official act of the last decade was automatically
redated in Gregorian dates (a huge undertaking). The court quite
properly referred, therefore, to the law of the 2nd of Thermidor, year II,
requiring all public and private legal documents to be in French only.
I don't see that it would improve the matter to date the law as
20 July 1794.

-- 
John Cowan                              <jcowan@reutershealth.com>
http://www.ccil.org/~cowan              http://www.reutershealth.com
Unified Gaelic in Cyrillic script!
        http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Celticonlang



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