Disputatio:La Comédie humaine

message: 'The society of france depicts the time of the nineteenth century' (Societas franciae tempus saeculi XIX depingit) is probably not what's intended to be said? IacobusAmor (disputatio) 10:38, 10 Septembris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: yeah, missed that;  editing quickly between meetings.  Also not at all happy with my provisional title for Illusions perdues but will poke at that more later (if you have a better idea, go right ahead!).  And we should eventually have a category for Balzac and all that good stuff.  A. Mahoney (disputatio) 12:21, 11 Septembris 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Grammatica

message: I thought the rule in French was that the first lexical word gets capitalized, along with a preposition or article if it's the very first word, and nothing else.  I would therefore expect Comédie to have a majuscule (and I'd expect À la Recherche du temps perdu).  Am I mis-remembering?  Or are we applying a lex vicipaediana rather than a French rule?  Given redirects this is not critical, but my linguist brain is curious!  A. Mahoney (disputatio) 12:19, 29 Septembris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: :This recalls the general rule given by the Chicago Manual of Style, perhaps the styleguide most widely used in North America: "In any language but English capitalize . . . the first word of the title and any proper names that occur in it" (13th ed., #9.4). But then: "The rule for French titles followed by the French Review, PMLA, and Romantic Review, and recommended by the University of Chicago Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, is as follows: Always capitalize the first word and any proper nouns in the title; if the first word is an article, capitalize the substantive and any intervening adjective(s); if the first word is neither an article nor an adjective, lowercase all following words. Thus: Le Rouge et le noir; L'Illusion comique; Les Fausses Vérités; A la recherche du temps perdu; Dans le labyrinthe."  IacobusAmor (disputatio) 11:49, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: :::Interesting. Slightly different from the French Wikipedia rule because it talks of all articles, not just definite articles. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:57, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)

text: We haven't up to now applied any French exception here (at least, not consistently :). We do apply the German exception (all nouns) and the English exception (all lexical words). Glancing through the list of Brigitte Bardot films at :fr:Brigitte Bardot, as I did recently, it struck me that neither the pagenames nor the piped titles were consistent on this, so the French rule must be a bit difficult even for writers of French to apply. Still, if others think we should, I wouldn't dispute it. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 12:41, 29 Septembris 2014 (UTC) [I do dispute it now, see below :) ]
replies: text: :[An aside:] I don't think I have ever seen À la Recherche du temps perdu. The French wiki makes it :fr:À la recherche du temps perdu, but under what interpretation of what rule I don't know. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 18:46, 29 Septembris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: ::The rule I'm most familiar with is the one given at fr:Wikipédia:Conventions typographiques#Principes de capitalisation des titres: all common nouns are lowercased except for the first word and the second if the first is a definite article, and the third if the second is a preposed adjective. So Une vie, À la recherche du temps perdu, but Les Misérables and Le Grand Meaulnes. So this would be La Comédie humaine. They also give some other exceptions. Now some French publishers just lowercase everything, and others may have other rules, but I'd vote for following the French style manual. Lesgles (disputatio) 22:57, 30 Septembris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: ::::These rules appear to match the rules in the Chicago Manual of Style, quoted above. IacobusAmor (disputatio) 11:53, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: :::::With a difference, see my note above :) Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:58, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)

text: :::Wow, that is really quite special. There is also the exception that meaningful clauses don't require capitalization: thus La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu. Yes, thanks for finding it, and we could follow it. As with our English and German rules, though to an even greater extent, it can only be applied by someone who knows the language. Well, Vicipaedians are by definition multilingual. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 09:12, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)

text: :::Continuing to think about this, though, I am a bit doubtful whether we are going the right way. To me, the German exception is different from the others because it is a fixed rule in writing all normal German text, so I would set that one aside. I don't think I argued it at the time, but my personal preference would have been for not applying any English exception and, now, I am for not applying any French one. If these two, why not all other languages according to their separate style manuals? And if we do that, don't our pagenames and texts begin to look endlessly inconsistent and become almost impossible to edit with confidence? After all (cf. Lesgles above), these are not invariable rules in the languages concerned. Le bon usage (my Bible on written French grammar) doesn't say a word about this, and doesn't follow any such rule in its own bibliography. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:18, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: ::::At it:Aiuto:Titoli di opere dell'ingegno the Italians have a summary of their own practices and some of the other language editions. For instance, Portuguese seems to follow English, and Spanish uses lowercase except in the names of periodicals. It would be possible to compose a similar guide in Latin. ¶ Using sentence-style capitalization everywhere is an option, and is one that is followed by many libraries. I'm still somewhat resistant, especially in the case of English; I might be a little put off by A tale of two cities, Paradise lost, A midsummer night's dream (or The New York times, The guardian...). ¶ By the way, one possible reason for the French definite article exception is the need to contract prepositions and articles in French, e.g. on :fr:Les Misérables "l'écriture des Misérables", "une suite controversée aux Misérables". Not relevant in Latin, though. ¶ I agree that decapitalizing German nouns should be out of the question, as well as decapitalizing proper nouns in any language. Lesgles (disputatio) 18:31, 1 Octobris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: :::::I guiltily confess that I never write, and never want to write, The guardian :)

text: :::::If you were offering to write a style guide on this issue (or indeed on every stylistic issue) I, for one, would happily entrust the matter to you! Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 11:27, 2 Octobris 2014 (UTC)

text: Hmmm, more complicated than I expected :)   I agree that German nouns need to be capitalized, and, like Lesgles, I find A tale of two cities odd-looking -- though one library catalog I regularly use actually does use this style in both English and French (Harvard's HOLLIS).  Given that our rule is to name our pages with the original-language title, though (so, this page is not called "Comoedia humana"), I would be tempted to say we should use the capitalization conventions of the title's own language, as part of writing a phrase in that language.   But, as Andrew says, this means we really need to know those conventions -- which, as we see here, is harder than it looks!  I would have said I did know the rules in French, for example, but clearly I don't write enough French.  Anyway, as I said at the start, with enough re-directs, we can accommodate everything, right?  A. Mahoney (disputatio) 13:05, 2 Octobris 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: :True. OK, fine, there's no doubt that following each language's conventions makes titles look better. (I was a librarian, and the catalogue I knew -- at Cambridge, Eng. as we never called it -- is just as you describe the Harvard catalogue. That's so nice and simple, but after all, I must admit, it doesn't really suit our context here.) We need to help editors to understand and apply these rules, though. Andrew Dalby (disputatio) 14:14, 2 Octobris 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Titulus