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Comment by karmakaze | Hacker News Reader

I didn't realize French was written with spaces before colons. It might be time to lose that space, similar to how we don't double space after period.

I'm not saying G.Docs or any editor should dictate how French is written, only being pragmatic if I have to choose between (no space): or unwanted emojis ending up in docs.

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We used to double-space after a period because that looked better on monospaced typewriters. But in French it's simply a part of punctuation, and getting it wrong means you wrote it wrong. It's as wrong as if I'm writing English and put a space before the ':' or '!', or put a comma after a quotation mark. French people shouldn't have to change their language to type in Google Docs. It should be the other way around.

In French it's a typographic rule become an orthographic rule. It doesn't have to be that way.

>It might be time to lose that space, similar to how we don't double space after period.

Well, that's is a bit like saying "it might be time to write your whenever you mean you're" just because Google Docs' autocorrect feature kept messing up the two when you wrote English.

How would it look like in an email to a client?

>if I have to choose between (no space): or unwanted emojis ending up in docs

We absolutely do not have to choose between those two things. We need to stop implementing cute automatic bullshit that makes assumptions about the way people interact with UIs.

I'd upvote for the first part of the second sentence, but downvote for the second part of the second sentence.

Typographically speaking English language text should have a wide space following a sentence-ending period [that isn't also a paragraph-ending period]. However, because wide spaces are not easy to type on normal keyboard layouts, the simplest thing to do is to type two spaces after sentence-ending periods and let the word processor change those to wide spaces when using a proportional font. When using a fixed-width font, however, it should always be two spaces after a sentence-ending period for two reasons: to disambiguate non-sentence-ending periods, and to make it easier to read. Coders write a lot of text in fixed-width fonts, so we should write two spaces after sentence-ending periods in, e.g., code comment blocks.

> similar to how we don't double space after period

What do you mean? Every sentence in this comment has two spaces after the punctuation. That one and this one. Just because browsers and html condense it all into one space doesn't make it right.

The French aren’t gonna change their language over an emoji picker. :slightly_smiling_face:

They should abandon out of date typographic rules though. As a French speaker, I want to.

If we had he opportunity to simplify some rules in French, it's not the one I'd do first.

How about getting rid somehow of the letter ù which is used for only one word (où)? Or replacing quatre-vingt by huitante (and same for 70 and 90) like in Switzerland? Or getting rid of œ and æ?

But none of it is realistic. We officially changed from oignon to ognon 32 years ago and people still don't know about it...

I find the 20-based counting system cute. I like it. In Belgian French they dropped it, but to my ear "septante", "huitante", and "novante" sound weird!

I don't mind "où". I especially do not want the circumflex accents removed (you didn't mention it, but there was an attempt in... the 90s?).

I wouldn't mind some spelling simplifications around all those eau/eaux/oeu/oeux type word endings.

> Or getting rid of œ and æ?

Yes.

the us is fairly unique in the rate it accepts common mistakes into the language. its part of how they diverged from the standard english used in the rest of the world so quickly...

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