Antoine Leca wrote: > the lowercase of Italian (or Corsican) "A'", "E'", ... at the end of a > word is likely to be "�", "�/�", ... (Marco, is it really true? and how > � and � are handled?) We should rather say that -A' (etc.) is a poor man's capitalization for -� (etc.). The proper capital form is, of course, -�. The use of apostrophes in place of final accents, specially on capital letters, became popular because of technical limitations: typewriters and old computer character sets (e.g. DOS code page 437) have no accented capitals, and Italian computer keyboards have no accented capitals nor dead keys. Moreover, final accents historically derive from apostrophes, because most words ending with accented vowels arose from the truncation of the last syllable (e.g., libert� used to be libertade, optionally truncated as libertad' or liberta'). A word of this kind is still called "tronca" in Italian grammars. I don't know of any commercial software automatically restoring proper accents when changing case, although many Italian users must have written such a word-processor macro at list once in their lives. But doing it seriously (and unattended) is a different matter: the ASCII apostrophe is used for lots of unrelated things: apostrophe proper, substitute for accents, quotation mark, abbreviation for "minute" or "prime", marking footnotes, transcription of Semitic languages, etc. The biggest problem, as you mentioned, is that -E' may be the capital form of both -� and -� (and also -e', by the way). So the proper place for such a thing is probably a spellchecker. I don't know which products implement such a feature, but for sure I would like to have it, 'cause the phonetic distinction behind the � and � spellings is totally obscure to me (northern Italian dialects normally have a 5- or 6-vowel system, vs. the 7 vowels of standard Italian). I don't know if all this is also true for Corsican. The only Corsicans I heard speaking stressed *all* their final vowels, so I assumed they didn't need any special diacritic :-) Ciao. _ Marco
