From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-10-25T13:58:46+09:00 Subject: Re: downcase part of a string On 10/25/06, Hal Fulton wrote: > That's the way I remember it -- he said that a lowercase accented > character was sometimes uppercased differently, and it varied > "from district to district." The wording was actually "jurisdiction to jurisdiction." This actually matters, because it really deals with major jurisdictions, like Qu�bec and Vietnam and Surinam and Algeria and� > Earlier tonight I think he mentioned Quebec (but with a proper accent > that I don't know how to type). Look at AllCaps, Hal. Then you'd do Ctrl, ', e (three separate keypresses, so not Ctrl-') to get �. Or do like me: get a Mac (Option-e, e). ;) > I wouldn't be surprised if the French sometimes sneered a little at > the French spoken in Quebec, the way (sometimes) Brits make fun of > Americans, or Spanish (or Colombians) make fun of Mexicans. They do. Sometimes it's absolutely awful. Although, it's much more like how (American) Northerners pick on (American) Southern drawls. If you have a chance to listen to a Qu�becois French speaker, listen carefully. You'll hear a bit of a twang like you would in the American south. Funnily enough, it's for similar reasons. The American north was settled first and most often, and had the biggest blending of language and dialect. The south, on the other hand, was settled a little later and ended up being a bit more sparsely populated and with fewer non-English speakers. So the old English speaking habits hung on a little longer and were a bit more isolated. The Qu�becois were separated from France at the time of the Seven Years' War�what Americans would call the French and Indian War. The French immigrants of the time were taught in an �cole system that was headed by the priests, who by and large spoke court French. When France lost all of Canada to England, the priests and nobles went back to France, rather than subjecting themselves to English rule. A mere thirty years later, most of them lost their heads and the French revolutionaries established schools�that taught the French that they knew. In other words, the French spoken after the revolution was mostly the French of the streets and of the salons, not royal French. From that point forward, the French spoken by the European French and the Qu�becois diverged some. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/ * austin@halostatue.ca * http://www.halostatue.ca/feed/ * austin@zieglers.ca