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The recode reference manual

12.7 Easy French conventions

This charset is available in recode under the name Texte and has txte for an alias. It is a seven bits code, identical to ASCII-BS, save for French diacritics which are noted using a slightly different convention.

At text entry time, these conventions provide a little speed up. At read time, they slightly improve the readability over a few alternate ways of coding diacritics. Of course, it would better to have a specialised keyboard to make direct eight bits entries and fonts for immediately displaying eight bit ISO Latin-1 characters. But not everybody is so fortunate. In a few mailing environments, and sadly enough, it still happens that the eight bit is often willing-fully destroyed.

Easy French has been in use in France for a while. I only slightly adapted it (the diaeresis option) to make it more comfortable to several usages in Québec originating from Université de Montréal. In fact, the main problem for me was not to necessarily to invent Easy French, but to recognise the "best" convention to use, (best is not being defined, here) and to try to solve the main pitfalls associated with the selected convention. Shortly said, we have:

e'

for e (and some other vowels) with an acute accent,

e`

for e (and some other vowels) with a grave accent,

e^

for e (and some other vowels) with a circumflex accent,

e"

for e (and some other vowels) with a diaeresis,

c,

for c with a cedilla.

There is no attempt at expressing the ae and oe diphthongs. French also uses tildes over n and a, but seldomly, and this is not represented either. In some countries, : is used instead of " to mark diaeresis. recode supports only one convention per call, depending on the `-c' option of the recode command. French quotes (sometimes called "angle quotes") are noted the same way English quotes are noted in TeX, id est by " and ". No effort has been put to preserve Latin ligatures (æ, œ) which are representable in several other charsets. So, these ligatures may be lost through Easy French conventions.

The convention is prone to losing information, because the diacritic meaning overloads some characters that already have other uses. To alleviate this, some knowledge of the French language is boosted into the recognition routines. So, the following subtleties are systematically obeyed by the various recognisers.

1. A comma which follows a c is interpreted as a cedilla only if it is followed by one of the vowels a, o or u.

2. A single quote which follows a e does not necessarily means an acute accent if it is followed by a single other one. For example:

   e'

   will give an e with an acute accent.

   e"

   will give a simple e, with a closing quotation mark.

   e"'

   will give an e with an acute accent, followed by a closing quotation mark.

   There is a problem induced by this convention if there are English quotations with a French text. In sentences like:

   There's a meeting at Archie's restaurant.

   the single quotes will be mistaken twice for acute accents. So English contractions and suffix possessives could be mangled.

3. A double quote or colon, depending on `-c' option, which follows a vowel is interpreted as diaeresis only if it is followed by another letter. But there are in French several words that end with a diaeresis, and the recode library is aware of them. There are words ending in "igue", either feminine words without a relative masculine (besaiguë and ciguë), or feminine words with a relative masculine(13) (aiguë, ambiguë, contiguë, exiguë, subaiguë and suraiguë). There are also words not ending in "igue", but instead, either ending by "i"(14) (ai", congai", goi", hai"kai", inoui", sai", samurai", thai" and tokai"), ending by "e" (canoë) or ending by "u"(15) (Esaü).

   Just to complete this topic, note that it would be wrong to make a rule for all words ending in "igue" as needing a diaerisis, as there are counter-examples (becfigue, bèsigue, bigue, bordigue, bourdigue, brigue, contre-digue, digue, d'intrigue, fatigue, figue, garrigue, gigue, igue, intrigue, ligue, prodigue, sarigue and zigue).