Re: [EGD-discu] Apostrophe in French

[Archange <archange@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Hugh,

Thing is, there is no good and comprehensive reference. They are numerous books about the subject,
that all have contradictions with each others (and as far as I know —I only own the first one—, neither of them is referencing Unicode, at least not as you want —mostly because they all predate Unicode), amongst which:

– https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexique_des_règles_typographiques_en_usage_à_l'Imprimerie_nationale, which is the official reference for the official (as in state-issued) french printing ;

– https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_typographique_(livre), which is edited by the association of french printers ;

– https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guide_du_typographe, which is the swiss equivalent of this one ;

– and I seem to remember there is also a québécois (canadian french) one, because basically each major french speaking country has its own version.

Which might makes you wonder where is the Belgian one, right? Well, a Belgian writer and typographer tried to make a synthesis of these works, you can find it there : http://www.orthotypographie.fr/pdf/orthotypographie-a-f.pdf and http://www.orthotypographie.fr/pdf/orthotypographie-g-z.pdf.

Another interesting and more up-do-date reference is http://jacques-andre.fr/faqtypo/lessons.pdf.

And finally, this is very often a matter of debate, and actually they have been several happening on this very mailing list. Like which dash should we use for what.

BTW, you reference is interesting but I have to disagree. The Unicode standard precisely says that U+2019 should be used for contractions and give “We’ve” as example, and also that the issue described is an implementation problem, because “The semantics of U+2019 are therefore context dependent. For example, if surrounded by letters or digits on both sides, it behaves as an in-text punctuation character and does not separate words or lines.”.

But maybe now you can see than even things that might look obvious to everyone a minimum involved, are in fact not. ;)

Regards,
Bruno

Le 10/06/2018 à 22:14, Hugh Paterson a écrit :

@All Thank you for this feed back. and the link to your wiki page.

@Mélanie thank you for this reference to Unicode.

@All, I am beginning to work with texts (for keyboard layout analysis) which sometimes has French text intermixed (such is often the case with minority languages in countries from Francophone Africa). I am quite aware of many Unicode things, but I am always learning. One language I am working with requires the use of U+02BC. Being that that the consensus that I am hearing here is that French uses U+2019, then it would make sense to 1) split the languages to two separate keyboards; or 2) make sure they are in two visually different locations. But if these language communities are to also write Internet addresses or code they may also want U+0027. So, yes there are complexities. I don't have a French language usage background. So, typographic encoding norms for French are new to me. Can anyone point me to a really good, trustworthy, accurate description (preferably with Unicode character points) of French Writing norms? Things like Casing rules, and capitalization rules, and where commas, periods, belong, what are the characters needed for writing French, what is the default NFD or NFC when doing text production in French, etc? The resource could be in French or English.

An interesting comment on the English use of the apostrophe can be read here:

https://tedclancy.wordpress.com/2015/06/03/which-unicode-character-should-represent-the-english-apostrophe-and-why-the-unicode-committee-is-very-wrong/

My current work of keyboard creation can be seen here: https://github.com/HughP/dnj-corpus.

thank you,

- Hugh Paterson III

On Sun, Jun 10, 2018 at 7:08 AM, Mélanie (ariasuni) <perso@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Le 09/06/2018 à 05:21, Hugh Paterson a écrit :

Greetings,

What is the correct Unicode character to use for Apostrophe in French?

e.g. d'abord, d'une, l’événement

Thanks,
- Hugh Paterson III

According to the Unicode Standard, U+2019 «[…] is the preferred character to use for apostrophe»[1] and about apostrophe, «' is preferred for apostrophe»[2]. It is also the consensus in typographical conventions.

Note that this is true for French and English and most other language using Latin alphabet, but not for some where the semantic of the apostrophe is different and other characters are recommended.

You can read more about it at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apostrophe>, see sections «Typographic form» and «Unicode».

[1]: <https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf>
[2]: <https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf>

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