egafd.com

Isn't there a misspelling in B?atrice Valle name? In French, "B?atrice" is spelled with "?" not "?".

In Ch?teau de dames on EGAFD, the wrong spelling is used but it shouldn't, see screenshot below. I doubt very much that the wrong spelling is used in most films referencing that name, so I guess it's an EGAFD editor mistake.

[IMG]http://img214.imagevenue.com/loc691/th_14361_cd_123_691lo.jpg[/IMG]

The correct spelling appears on the search page though.

As far as I know, the French female name is spelled this way: B?atrice (this is
called an "accent aigu" for the letter "e").


How her name was invariably spelled on box covers ar actual movie credits I
don't really know or recall. I don't have any of her movies readily available to
make a more deep analysis.

Having said that, it would be grammatically incorrect for anyone with some
technical knowledge of the French language to ever spell it as B?atrice.

Therefore the spelling of her her name on EGAFD movie page (with the "e" as an "accent grave")

is technically incorrect. It should be modified.

I hadn't noticed it, to be honest - it's obviously just an historical typo.
Corrected. If it's any consolation, when I hear fellow English-speakers refer to
Dante's muse as 'Bee-a-triss' rather than 'Bay-a-tree-chay', I'm likely to punch
them in the head.

In general we do try to follow native orthographies with respect to accents
and diacritics - but sometimes we forget or are simply ignorant; and sometimes
it's more practical to ignore them - the usual defence for the latter would be
that this is [for better or worse] an English-language forum. There are also
cases where the orthography is intentionally garbled, for example as part of
a punning title - and of course these we leave intact.
No excuse in this case for the oversight - although I'd point out that in capitals
[which are frequently used in titles] even the French themselves are inconsistent
as to the inclusion of accents : -)

As an aside, I've recently amended the titles of some of the 'Allo Nurses'
volumes to include a circumflex over the 'o' - but [and I agree this is slightly
OCD of me] only for the titles I've been able to personally verify : -)

Thanks for the clarifications and the fixes.

About accents on capitals in French, I'm sure officially they're needed, however it seems most people do not use them, mostly out of ignorance and simplicity; that's how they see accents used and how they're taught to do in school--I know, I didn't know either that accents were needed on capitals, until I explicitly read about French typography a few years ago. Omitting accents on capitals is a long-established habit apparently having its main cause in the lack of or more difficult support of accented capitals in printing machines of the past; no accented capitals in printed media make people believe it's official usage, of course. Add to that the added keyboard work needed to type them and the slight ugliness of the result in some fixed-sized fonts and some layouts (vertical line spacing can be expanded because of accented capitals), and you have the perfect environment to make an incorrect usage last.

By the way, browsing film titles for B?atrice Valle, I spotted another spelling mistake in "Les Cl?fs du plaisir": in French, the word for "key" is either "cl?" or "clef", so mixing the two as "cl?f" is a mistake. In the case of "Les clefs du plaisir", one should of course check to be sure, but I think it's okay to drop the accent for now, and oh, capital usage is inconsistant here also, I don't know what the capitals usage policy is here...

Use of accents where the word characters are in lower-case or upper case does
not seem to follow a certain pattern.
When written in lower case, the necessary accents are practically always used.
But it gets very tricky when the words are all expressed in upper case.
If you read publications (newspaperrs, magazines) from old times and more recent times
either printed in France or in French-speaking regions of the world you will have noted
that accents in upper cased words are sometime there and sometimes they are absent.
Perhaps a question of expediency, saving on ink, type/space setting, I really don't know.

With regards to accents there are quirky renditions in EGAFD.
Take a look at the film list for the letter "A" (French titles beginning with
single letter "A"): some have accents and many do not

The AF is fighting a losing battle [inevitably so] against evolutionary usage
in France. Mind you; even I find 'le weekend' and 'un relooking' somewhat
[de trop : -)
Englsh has its hidebound traditionalists too, although we are rather less
organized - and I like to think I'm not too inflexible.... I don't moan about
split infinitives, for example.

CduP: amended. Clearly an error [see the cover-title note].

As to capitals, a doubled usage will often occur where the title starts with
an article: so, 'Les Clefs...'. It looks untidy in the data-entry tool to have
lower-case 'l' and upper-case 'C' - and in English we'd usually write "The
Keys....". Also, the alphabetical listing works on the first non-articular
word of the title and having some in lower-case would look odd.
IMO it's a minor matter and bothers me not one whit.

For French/Italian/Scandinavian I capita;ize only the first word [or words, if
there's an article] - this is part laziness, and partly to avoid pedants [or
more charitably, purists] sending us endless streams of invective about spelling
perche with a P : -)
German is of course an exception, with its capitalized nouns.
Russian and other titles in different orthographies are usually rendered using
the transliteration submitted to us.

Prewar UK newspapers are full of such apparent oddities, which of course
seemed perfectly normal back then.

As a last word from me on this topic, two quotes [perhaps ironically, both
American]:

Emerson: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds....".

Whitman: Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself; I am
large, I contain multitudes".