From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Apr 01 2006 - 01:55:44 CST
From: "Timothy Partridge" <timpart@perdix.demon.co.uk>
> MUFI are trying to standardise the most common (old) forms of abbreviation.
Huhh??? What is MUFI? May be you should restrict the extent of your sentence. Most old abbreviations have a very strong tradition, and they appearin authoritative dictionnaries,and have legal meaning as well.I hope such "standard" will not break these legacy (and sometimes mandatory) orthographies.
As I said, the abbreviations for the most commonwords have a very strict and well defined orthography that does not need and use any subscript or superscript distinction. Superscript notations are possible but this is just a typographical effect: the normative orthography must NOT change. So "M<sup>me</sup>" is correct if it uses typography by encoding the *normal* "me" final letters (but not if you use API symbols). If superscript style is not available or the document must beconverted to plain-text, you can safely drop those style and write "Mme" only: you get in fact the MOST common way to write this abbreviation, and forms without superscripts are the ONLY ones that you'll find in a printed contract or notarial act (in such act, the abbreviations can be used after they have been defined in the text itself).
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