Military service

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Permalink Reply by Marc Vonhalmen on October 6, 2009 at 6:01pm

Le Premier Ministre, ce n'est pas un homme. Bien qu'en excellente santé, il n'a jamais rempli ses obligations militaires envers son pays, obligations que tout homme en bonne santé se doit de remplir. On peut donc logiquement en conclure que ce n'est pas un homme.

(that's one way, among many, to translate your sentence).

NB: "Le Premier Ministre n'est pas un homme" sounds a bit less redundant. There is no need to repeat the subject of the sentence in this case.
NB2: "faire son service militaire" or "accomplir son service militaire" or "remplir son devoir militaire" are synonymous to "remplir ses obligations militaires"

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Permalink Reply by Frank on October 6, 2009 at 7:19pm

Titles and roles must be written with lower-case letters.

So, no need for any upper-case letter in premier ministre although an upper-case letter in "Premier" would be acceptable (but not required) as a way to emphasize the fact that "premier" doesn't have its usual meaning.

Maybe this is yet another thing that slightly differ from English.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 6, 2009 at 11:42pm

Yes, there are definitely differences in the use of capitals. In general:

- there's less of a tendency in French to capitalise ALL words of a phrase/title-- usually just the article and first "content" word;
- there's less of a tendency in French to capitalise things like month names, week names and titles of people.

Nonetheless, some capitalisation does appear to be creeping in in French where traditionally it didn't tend to be used. Remember there's no reason why capitalisation MUST be in any particular way. Nothing's decreed by God -- it's just a matter of tradition and human opinion at the end of the day, and either of these can change.

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Permalink Reply by Frank on October 6, 2009 at 11:56pm

French Capitalization rules are as convoluted as grammar. Here's a web page that tries to summarizes these rules:

http://j.poitou.free.fr/pro/html/typ/cap-emplois.html

But although this is something kids are still learning at school, this is also something everybody tends to forget really quickly, just like every other rule related to typography. It's why if you don't follow these rules, it's no biggie, unless :
- you are writing books or articles,
- or you have a picky French teacher who doesn't want to admit how irrelevant it is nowadays. And unfortunately, some members of the forum have such a teacher. And turning a blind eye to traditional (and eventually useless) rules might hurt their grade.

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Permalink Reply by Neil Coffey on October 7, 2009 at 1:58am

I repeat, though -- "rules" such as these aren't absolute gospel and are subject to varying trends and opinions. The author of the article advocates writing "tour Eiffel" with a capital only on "Eiffel", but the Tour Eiffel's own web site and publicity material chooses to capitalise both words in many cases. You could give reasons for preferring one or the other option, but it's difficult to say why either is intrinsically "right" or "wrong".

Your teacher may also have an opinion, but you shouldn't unquestioningly take what your teacher says as some kind of intrinsic truth either.

For learners, I'd say really don't be too paranoid. Try and look out for general trends in good quality French writing. Disagreeing slightly with Frank, I seriously don't think any teacher or examiner is going to scar you for life if you write "Pont Neuf" when they preferred "pont Neuf".

(Incidentally, I should add that some of my observations on usage come from translation work I do in collaboration with other French speakers, some of which for publication, where we do sometimes debate the usage of capitalisation and punctuation. More often than not, the conclusion we end up coming to is "there's no concensus".)

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