Re: [patch] Fix inner smart quotes in French

[Bastien]

Max Nikulin <manikulin@gmail.com> writes:

> On 04/08/2023 18:09, Bastien wrote:
>> Juan Manuel Macías writes:
>> 
>>> In the meantime, I'm submitting this patch with a fix for second-level
>>> French `smart quotes': the correct quotes should be “” (without spaces,
>>> as in Spanish or Greek) (please, some francophone correct me, if I'm
>>> wrong...).
>> Applied, thanks!
>
> I am not a francophone, I just have tried to look into sources I found
> during discussion on Greek quotes.
>
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#French
> says that there are different styles of inner quotes.
>
> I am more worry that Unicode CLDR defines the same character for
> quotes. 

Yes, this is also what the French national printing press ("Imprimerie
nationale"), which is quite authoritative in this matter, recommends.

Note that the Full recommendation of the Imprimerie nationale is to
repeat second-level quotation marks at the beginning and of each line
when the text spans over several lines, like this:

  Then X reported : « This is what Y said : « Here is
  « a quotation with a paragraph spaning over several
  « lines, with each line starting with a quotation mark
  « until the end of the quotation. » 

(The unique » at the end is intentional, the rule is to not repeat.)

I don't have a strong opinion on this.  I find the non-French
(e.g. canadian?) convention more sensible for digital documents (vs
printed ones): I expect repeating the quotation mark at the beginning
of each line is something software don't do.  (Perhaps there is a
LaTeX package doing so, I've not checked.)

So I'd rather use this:

  Then X reported : « This is what Y said : ”Here is
  a quotation with a paragraph spaning over several
  lines, with each line starting with a quotation mark
  until the end of the quotation."»

WDYT?

-- 
 Bastien