From: Antoine Leca (Antoine10646@leca-marti.org)
Date: Wed Sep 21 2005 - 05:41:34 CDT
On Wednesday, September 21st, 2005 06:34Z Jukka K. Korpela wrote:
> Interestingly, when I looked up some of the words in the online
> version of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie,
> http://atilf.atilf.fr/academie9.htm ,
> I found that it indeed uses the "æ" spelling, but I was able to find
> the entries only by using "ae" (e.g., "caecal") in my input (e.g.,
> "cæcal" finds nothing).
You probably used the "wrong" encoding while using the form, and the ATILF
tool probably did not know how to decode your query into his proper encoding
(which is probably not Unicode ;-))
<FUSS>
> but in MS Word, I noticed that the method Ctrl-Shift-6 a (which
> produces "æ" when the keyboard setting is e.g. US English, on
> my computer) produces nothing when the keyboard setting is
> French. Yet Ctrl-Shift-6 o produces the letter oe.
I guess the Redmoners that programmed Word (the French WWINTL, that is) did
not know about the Æ in French; and Les Ulis either do/did not know either,
or do/did not want to bring the former out of sleep to correct such a minor
thing ;-). As a former "topselling account" I can assert that French
customers cannot have this kind of things changed by the marketing way (you
have to justify a potential multi-millionary loss to even been attended for
such kind of changes.)
So the only remaining way is to make a lot of fuss here to catch the
relevant Redmoners' attention, and have this scheduled for some next release
;-)
</FUSS>
> In practice, it seems that words with "æ" in their official (?)
> spelling are mostly written with "ae".
Yes, it was my point exactly (including the ?). Similarly "œ" is written as
"oe", no difference here.
I gave Google statistics early this summer about œ: oe outnumbered it by
more than 1000.
> Would you like to have French dropped out just because
> the repertoire of the device does not include "æ"?
Not a relevant point: Æ is required for some Scandinavians orthographies
which outnumbers French use.
But the point is valid when applied to Œ, or Catalan · (which users in turn
outnumbers the above Scandinavians, but is not a official language within
EU). It depends on which point of view you are taking: marketers just do not
care, since they know that such a minor defect will not prevent them to sell
in France (or Spain); users neither care, as it should be clear now;
however, when you speak with officials of any class, politicians, people
which are in representation or delegation of their country, they can be
_very_ picky on such issues; for example, I believe French was retracted for
the list of languages supported by parts 1-3 of ISO/IEC 8859 in the 1998
revision, because of the Œ (and Ÿ) issue.
Antoine
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