French spelling question - rýsistant aux instead of résistant aux

December 20, 2014 6:29 AM

I bought some French glassware (Lys brand) recently, and the descriptions on the box had some unusual spellings that I hadn't encountered before. É was changed to Ý ("résistant aux" was written as "rýsistant aux"), and À was changed to Ô (so "adapté à" became "adaptý ô"). Can someone explain this for me?
posted by Auden to Society & Culture (7 answers total)

Response by poster: (sorry, Duralex brand... Lys glassware service set)

... another change I forgot to mention: "pièces" was written as "piüces".
posted by Auden at 6:35 AM on December 20, 2014

Best answer: I bet it's something to do with how special characters (e.g. accented letters) are handled in whatever software they were using to lay out the copy. It probably looked fine when they were writing the descriptions, but at some point between there and printing, the accented letters got swapped and no one noticed the difference. Maybe someone else knows exactly how it happened, but it's definitely an error.
posted by Metroid Baby at 6:45 AM on December 20, 2014 [4 favorites]

Best answer: I used to work in foreign language publishing and character conversion problems with diacritics, like Metroid Baby suggests, were a fairly common issue when we were developing digital content. It's definitely not correct French and the systematic nature of the replacements indicates that it's a conversion problem.

Sounds like Duralex needs to hire a competent proofreader for its packaging, or revise their process...
posted by Kosh at 6:53 AM on December 20, 2014 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: Well, that's disappointing, but I think you guys are right. Software glitch.

I thought it might be some older or regional form of French, used on their box as a homage to those glass-makers of yore, who for centuries had honed borosilicate and tempered glass into finely nestled serving and mixing bowls.
posted by Auden at 9:48 AM on December 20, 2014 [6 favorites]

I'm certain that as others said above, it's just a character set problem. (I blame UTF-8.) But if it helps going forward, I know that the circonflexe is often an indication that the vowel used to be followed by an S, in Old French. [cite] So ô would be a shortening of writing "os" (like how you can transcribe ö as oe, in German, if you haven't got/aren't using accent marks). Like, hôtel vs hostel, fête vs feste.
posted by sldownard at 1:41 PM on December 20, 2014 [1 favorite]

> (I blame UTF-8.)

As a former multilingual dictionary text shepherd from the days of 8-bit character sets, I say: don't blame the single most useful advance in text encoding since Baudot. If you wish to try maintaining texts in a mix of ISO-Latin-1, ISO-Cyrillic-5, ISO-Greek-7, KOI8-R and EBCDIC Cyrillic Russian, go right ahead ...

I almost broke out my old tools to track which was the source and destination character sets, but that would be a lot of work, and I've done everything to expunge the memory of nasty old charsets from my life.
posted by scruss at 2:00 PM on December 20, 2014 [4 favorites]

FWIW, I've studied several older and regional French dialects (European-based), and none of them resemble those substitutions.

Furthermore, if it were dialectical I'd expect non-accented characters to change as well. For instance, "Je t'aime" becomes "Je t'oime" in Walloon or Jersais - some damned dialect I can't pinpoint right now. "Vous êtes" => "Vous estes".

Those aren't the changes you're seeing, so the problem is computerish, not linguistic.
posted by IAmBroom at 9:18 AM on December 23, 2014 [1 favorite]