French street names

[Vince]

Alex, do you have a preference/standard for “rue” vs. “Rue” in French street names? CMS (11.26) says it (and other generic words, e.g. boulevard, place, etc.) are lowercased, and we have a number of them in the corpus, but we have far more Rue. Should we follow CMS or is this an exception? If the latter, does it need to be documented somewhere?

[Alex Cabal]

I think that falls under "non English capitalization" which is language
dependent. I don't know any French or French typography. Words like
Boulevard, Place, are common English words, but Rue is not and AFAIK is
only used for proper street names. So for now I would say leave it as is
in print, unless anyone else has strong arguments one way or the other.

[Vince]

I don’t know French typography, either (although I’ve seen a lot of it in looking at the original French versions of several translations I’ve worked on), that’s why I looked it up in CMS. :) For boulevard and place, I meant generic in the context of a French street name, not generically anywhere. Obviously they would be capitalized in U.S. street names, but they’re not in French ones. Just like they don’t use the same rules for publication names, etc.

So whether a book uses Rue or rue, leave it as is. OK.

[François Grandjean]

What I can tell you about the French rule (which you seem to have already observed) is that the generic word (rue, place, boulevard, square, etc.) isn’t capitalised; the specific word is capitalised.

For example: la rue Barbe, le boulevard Iole, la place Rouge.

But some Parisian toponyms are capitalised: le Jardin des Plantes, les Grands Boulevards, le Bois de Boulogne, etc.These are basically places that became proper names.

Hope that helps!