French punctuation oddities (was: Consistent punctuation oddities)

[Damien Hall]

Lynne:

> My French students put spaces before commas and periods.  I wonder if French
> word-processors treat the space as non-breaking?

Me (and others similarly):

> French normative punctuation (at least that of France) inserts a space before
> (and after) semi-colons, colons, exclamation-marks and question-marks, but not
> before commas, full-stops or quotation-marks.

Joel:

> Perhaps the French students type a non-breaking space there?  (Very unlikely,
> I'm sure.)  What do your students do when re-flowing lines causes such a comma
> or period to appear at the beginning of the line?  Do you ever see these at
the > beginning of a line?

> How do the word processors and typesetting systems ensure that the colon
> (etc.) are not widowed at the beginning of a line?

Arnold:

> i used to get an odd treatment of parentheses in some papers from foreign
> students (it's been long enough that i don't recall what countries they were
> from) -- lack of spaces outside the parens, and spaces inside, and sometimes
> both.

James:

> Part of my day job involves handling documents in French, produced usually --
> but not always -- by translators. It's quite common but not universal for the
> space before the colon, semicolon, question mark, exclamation mark, and
> percent sign, and inside guillemets (angle quotes) to be in the documents I
> receive as non-breaking. (Note that not all francophones actually insert those
> spaces before, however; the average fraoncophone is no more expert a user of
> his or her language than the average anglophone is, and even French experts,
> e.g., translators, disagree with each other all the time, usually
> vehemently.) When the version the public gets to see is produced, of course,
> they're always non-breaking.
>
> To complicate things further, the space before some of these marks is supposed
> to be a thin space. MS Word doesn't really accommodate those agreeably,
> however, so that gets done in the layout. _Which_ ones get a thin space is
> again a subject of often violent disagreement.

Here are the results of a little experiment that I've just done with the MS Word
2007 French (France) version.  I'm not claiming that MS is an authority on
French typographical conventions, of course, but they are usually careful to
(try to) localise as much as they can.  I would consult a grammar or two as
well, but I'm at home and don't have a good one by me.

In part, these results replicate what James says above, but FWIW here's what MS
thinks.  I tested all these things by setting a new document to 'French
(France)' and typing into it the names of the numbers, with different
punctuation in each list.  When I say 'grammatical' below, I mean that Word
didn't mark it with a green wavy line underneath;  'ungrammatical' means that
it did.

FULL STOPS
- No space is automatically inserted between the preceding word and the
punctuation.
- Grammatical when placed immediately after the preceding word.
- Ungrammatical with any kind of space (either full or non-breaking) between the
preceding word and the punctuation.

COMMAS
- No space is automatically inserted between the preceding word and the
punctuation.
- Grammatical when placed immediately after the preceding word.
- Grammatical with either kind of space (full or non-breaking) between the
preceding word and the punctuation.

SEMI-COLONS
- Non-breaking spaces are automatically inserted between the preceding word and
the punctuation.
- However, if you go in and manually remove the auto-inserted non-breaking
spaces, it isn't marked as ungrammatical.

COLONS
As for semi-colons.

QUOTATION-MARKS
- Double-quotes are automatically changed to angle-quotes.
- A non-breaking space is automatically inserted after opening angle-quotes and
before closing ones.
- However, if you go in and manually remove the auto-inserted non-breaking
spaces, it isn't marked as ungrammatical.
- Single-quotes are not changed and no auto-space is inserted;  but you don't
often see those in French text anyway.

PARENTHESES
As for commas:
- No space is automatically inserted between the preceding word and the
punctuation.
- Grammatical when placed immediately after the preceding word.
- Grammatical with either kind of space (full or non-breaking) between the
preceding word and the punctuation.

QUESTION-MARKS
Also as for commas:
- No space is automatically inserted between the preceding word and the
punctuation.
- Grammatical when placed immediately after the preceding word.
- Grammatical with either kind of space (full or non-breaking) between the
preceding word and the punctuation.


The possible widowed-punctuation problem is solved by the auto-inserted spaces
being non-breaking.

The above rules seem to be borne out by a random selection of recently-published
French books picked up off my study floor.  The caveat (apart from a general one
about any grammatical pronouncements made by a software company) is that the
Word spell-checker's threshold for ungrammaticality seems pretty low (in that a
lot gets past it):  for example, a comma with one space before it is not marked
ungrammatical (as we would expect from Lynne's comment), but neither is a comma
with a random but large number of spaces before it.  I conclude, insofar as a
conclusion is possible, that, if it's marked ungrammatical by Word, chances are
it really _is_, but, if it's not so marked, we can't really tell.

The inserted spaces are not, as far as I can tell, thin - they look no different
from standard spaces - and this is as stated by James.


Some other French punctuational oddities (at least considered from an Anglophone
point of view):
- Quoted passages are sometimes marked with angle-quotes at the beginning of
each typographical line of the quotation (regardless of the word that happens
to start that line, or of whether a sentence starts there, or anything):  it
looks very like the e-mail auto-marking of quotations with single chevrons at
the start of each line.  This is especially true in older (say pre-WWII, off
the top of my head) printed texts, and maybe also with literary texts from the
high-class publishers today.
- It is permissible to combine hyphens with other punctuation, in a similar way
to what Joel's quoted 1852 passage did (in English):

> There can hardly remain, for me, (who am really getting to be a
> frosty bachelor, with another white hair, every week or so, in my
> moustache,) there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon
> the hearth, as that which I remember the next day, at Blithedale.  (1852)

except that in French literary texts it's still common today.  It's a useful
device for marking when a parenthetical thought (indicated by the dashes) also
comes at the end of a clause but not at the end of the sentence (at the end of a
sentence, of course, the parenthetical thought would just be in parentheses
followed by a full stop).  I've often wished you could do it in English.
- Narrator's / parenthetical interjections into quoted speech don't have to be
explicitly marked, in literary texts:

<< Monsieur, dit-il avec surprise, vous ne partez pas?>>

(made-up example;  "Sir, he said in surprise, aren't you leaving?")

Enough.  I sense this is getting OT for the *American* Dialect Society, but
those who were interested in the discussion of French punctuation (and how it
might leak into secong-language writers' English) might be interested.

Damien Hall
University of Pennsylvania

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