Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2012 June 11

= June 11 =

Marathi to English
Friends could anyone tell me the meaning of this? Forgive me if something is wrong! Marathi transliterated: "thume naithe mee nai thume maja shangotuchraava cammabi" -- 16:16, 11 June 2012‎ 122.164.158.245

Question about new French spelling
In the list of spelling rectifications from 1990, it says that the rule removing circumflex accents from i and u doesn't apply to proper nouns, giving the example of Nîmes. But does this apply to the ubiquitous île as part of placenames? Is it now correct to write Ile-de-France and Ile-du-Prince-Édouard? --Lazar Taxon (talk) 19:09, 11 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I think that still counts as a proper noun, and officially it still has a circumflex (the region's official emblem, for example, and on French license plates). But generally people seem not to type accents of any sort on capital letters (maybe because it's difficult to do on a French keyboard, for some letters). In any case, as far as I understand, the spelling reform of 1990 was really only a "recommendation" and not strict rules, so people are free to ignore them. (I know "aout" and "août" for August are both acceptable, at least.) Adam Bishop (talk) 21:54, 11 June 2012 (UTC)


 * While in France I was told that it was actively wrong to put accents on capital letters in French, though I believe the Académie Française disagrees. Certainly, it's not unusual to leave them off even in handwritten French.


 * FWIW, on fr.wiki the article île is spelt with a circumflex (including on the capital), and it's evidently felt that the alternate spelling ile is rare enough that it needs a citation. Kahastok talk 22:14, 11 June 2012 (UTC)


 * At one time, there was a style (in all-caps inscriptions or notices on buildings, etc.) in which only É (and possibly sometimes Ç) were distinguished, while other diacritics on upper-case letters were left off. Not sure whether this is still done, but it influenced the choice of which characters to include in Code page 437... AnonMoos (talk) 22:46, 11 June 2012 (UTC)


 * I notice that I can make an î and an Î on my French keyboard, but I actually have no idea how to make a capital ç or a capital é (well, using the keys themselves, anyway...I can still make them with ASCII codes). Adam Bishop (talk) 12:13, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I've been trying to figure out how to make a capital ç in Windows on a Swiss French keyboard... I can do the É just fine ( Alt Gr+'´'+SHIFT+E), but the capital 'Ç' still eludes me... So I just write Cela instead of Ça.  It turns out that on Linux I can get the Ç with the Caps Lock (which I just discovered about 10 minutes ago as I was writing this), but I have no clue on Windows.  In any case, I just asked the question on the Computing Desk if you ware interested. Falconus p  t   c 14:01, 12 June 2012 (UTC)
 * The general but not universal rule for ASCII characters, which translate into Alt+ codes in Windows (holding down the Alt key while typing four digits) is that Capital Letters are 32 less than their lower case equivalents. Alt+0233 gives é and alt+0201 gives É; Alt+0231 gives ç and alt+0199 gives Ç. (And +ça change, +c'est la même chose.) ¶ The Character Map, if you can find one on your Windows system, can be very helpful, particularly if you're using a non-standard font or trying to find a non-West European character like the č in Alexander Dubček and the Č in Karel Čapek. In my Compaq computer's configuration of Windows Vista, the Character Map is under Windows > System 32 > charmap.exe. The Microsoft Office web site has a "virtual keyboard" for Microsoft Word 2000, and presumably for later versions, that will replicate the configuration of almost every standard keyboard, including variants such as Belgian French and Swiss French. But Medeis' advice below, about using the Special Characters tool for editing in Wikipedia is also sound, if editing in Wikipedia is your purpose. ¶ My 2004 Petit Larousse Illustré [p. 1416] circumflexes all the capital Î's in the alphabetical entries for Île-aux-Moines, Île-de-France, Île-du-Prince-Édouard, Île-d'Yeu, etc. —— Shakescene (talk) 12:37, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
 * ASCII codes work fine (as does the special characters box medeis mentioned below), but for some reason it bothers me that I can't use the French keyboard combinations to make ordinary French letters, haha. Alt Gr + ' produces { (and the number 4 with the shift key). Alt Gr + ` = È, but in that case, ` is the character normally produced by using Alt Gr with that key (which is otherwise the è key, or the number 7 with shift). I can also make upper and lowercase ì, ù, à, and ò with it, and another è, despite the fact that à, ù, and è are already separate keys. Alt Gr + the é produces a tilde, which can be combined to make upper and lowercase ã, õ, and ñ. Shift + é produces the number 2. Nothing seems to produce a capital é or ç. Adam Bishop (talk) 12:52, 13 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Two things: First of all, accents are usually not used on capital letters - the one exception is É, which might be accented, even if the other letters don't have accents on them, but even that is rarely used. (The reason for keeping the accent on the e is that the è and é affect the pronounciation, whereas the other accents, i.e. the circonflexe and the grave accent on a and u are either due to etymology or to separate homonyms.) From what I've been taught, correct writing should use accents, always, regardless of whether the letters are lower or upper case. (When I write French in OO.o, however, the autocorrect actually removes accents on capital letters.) Since capital letters aren't usually accented in writing, already, the normal way of writing Île-de France would be Ile-de-France, regardless of the 1990 orthography.
 * That reason would appear to ignore the cedilla. --ColinFine (talk) 18:09, 13 June 2012 (UTC)
 * I haven't found any information on this specifically, but I would assume that the spelling of these place names would be changed as well. The problem, so far, is that the 1990 orthography isn't obligatory, and French language is quite conservative. As a parallel, I would point you to the town Liège, and the word liège, meaning 'cork'. In 1878, the spelling of cork was changed from 'liége' to 'liège'. (As a modern reader, the first spelling seems rather odd, as it would imply the prononciation /lje.ʒ/, i.e. the sound /ʒ/ isn't really part of a syllable, and the pronounciation is ambiguous. On the other hand, the spelling liège can only be read in one way: /ljɛʒ/. The spelling of the town, however, (as a locality outside of France, it wasn't affected by the Académie's decisions) wasn't changed from 'Liége' to 'Liège' until 1946. V85 (talk) 07:22, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

When editting simply click on "Special characters" above the dialog box, click on "Latin" and...voilà! μηδείς (talk) 02:41, 13 June 2012 (UTC) Or did you mean outside wikipedia? μηδείς (talk) 02:42, 13 June 2012 (UTC)