capitals - Diinlang and Languages

This is a follow on to my last post, with some ideas to make capitalization in English more user-friendly.

The core of this proposal is for a consistent manner to identify proper nouns and related adjectives. The proposed approach is:

• Treat proper nouns as the names of specific things.

Often this will apply to an individual item, or a very select grouping.

Such proper nouns will be capitalized.

• Treat common nouns as generally applying to categories or sub-groupings.

A common noun may or may not encompass one or more proper nouns.

Common nouns are uncapitalized unless first in a sentence, all the sentence is capitalized or in title case.

This approach still leaves some grey areas and ambiguities.

• For want of other authorities, whether to capitalize such nouns is left to the writer.

Whatever choice is made for each case, the treatment should be applied consistently throughout the document.

• All or None: If judged a proper noun, all of the adjectives with the noun in the noun phrase will be capitalized. Adjectives are only capitalized when with a proper noun.

This approach gives the reader a clear indication of where the proper noun ends.

For long proper noun phrases, title case format may be used.

For ease of reference and accessibility I suggest the capitalization system on the Wikipedia Manual of Style be used. Effectively, for title case, this means capitalize the first and last word. Each word in the clause/phrase is capitalized unless it is:

A definite or indefinite article in a non-initial position.
A short coordinating conjunction (FANBOYS).
A preposition of four letters or less.
The word “to” in infinitives.

Proper nouns may be taken to include, but are not limited to:

Proper names, including titles and adjectives that are a part of the name.
Titles used in place of proper names. Such incidences are most likely to occur in speech. “Can I get a comment, Senator?”, “I need you Granny.” I am uncertain as to whether this applies to third person statements.
Names of specific organized religions and their adherents.
Names of specific books, films or other works of art or reference.
Names of specific companies, brand names, product or model names. Brand names that have become generic terms are uncapitalized.
Names of specific geographical features, including the names of individual mountains, rivers, seas, oceans, valleys.
Names of specific roads, streets, buildings, cities, towns, villages, regions.
Names of specific countries, counties, areas, continents, nations. Specific names derived from such: Italian Coffee, English Muffin.
Names of specific nationalities or ethnicities: Asian, Italian, Mexican American, Caucasian, Black, White.
Names of specific days, months and named holidays.
Names of specific time periods, historical evens and geological eras. Spanish Civil War, Middle Ages, Boxer Rebellion, Jurassic Era.
Names of specific planets, moons, stars or other celestial bodies (including the Earth when referred to as a world or planet).

Not usually capitalized:

Definite and indefinite articles, unless an integral part of the name: “The Hague”, “The Lord of the Rings”.
The names of the seasons, unless personified.
The points of the compass and similar terms, unless integral to a name.
The designation of centuries: twentieth century, fifteenth century.
Common names of animals, plants and other organisms unless they include a proper name. Names of cultivar groups and breeds probably should be capitalized. The latter are often named after regions, anyway.
Names of literary or musical genres, unless containing a proper name.

• Scientific names are capitalized at genera-level and higher.

The second half of a species name is never capitalized, even if derived from a proper name.

The subspecies name, if stated, is treated the same as the second part of the species name.

It was once the convention to underline a species name when it was written. In typed format, the convention now seems to be to italicize the species name. Hence, the correct format for a scientific name is Homo sapiens idaltu.

As seems inevitable with English, inconsistencies arise.

In a sentence such as “The army wants to buy more”, the term “the army”, clearly refers to a specific army, such as the US Army or British Army. This would suggest it should be “Army”.

The Wikipedia Manual of Style requires “the university” to be uncapitalized in a similar construction.

This page suggest that a proper noun should be capitalized except when they are used alone later in the paragraph: “We went fishing on the James River. Later, our family joined us at the river.”

This reminds me of how an abbreviation may be used if already introduced in previous text.

Another construction that “feels wrong” is to leave “the pope” uncapitalized.

There may be many kings in the world at any time, but usually only one pope.

When used in the singular, the title refers to a very specific individual, and the title is effectively substituting for a proper name.

The same logic may be applied to “god” when used as a proper name to refer to the Abrahamic diety.

In general, it is good to learn new things.

I am, however, a little disturbed by how many new things about English I have learnt over the last few years.

Given how long I had to spend in school, I might hope that I would have been well-versed in these concepts by the time I graduated.

It is a fact that my English teacher never formally taught us the rules of grammar, but I find many other people at a similar or worse level.

Contributing to the situation is that most of “the rules of English grammar” are not rules at all.

Many of them are prescriptions: someone’s opinion of how English should or should not be written.

Such opinions have many origins.

How does on decide whether to accept or ignore a prescription?

There are a number of style guides, such as the “Chicago Manual of Style” and Gower’s Plain Words. One may be obligated to follow one of these if writing for certain publications.

Most guides differ on various points, so whatever you write some of your readers will consider wrong!

My personal “acid test” is based on whether a rule or prescription contributes to clarity and comprehension.

Another problem with mastery of English is that at an early age we are sold other lies.

Not only are most rules not rules: we are taught false dogma too.

“Sound it out” is not useful advice for learning how to spell English words. One in eight English words are not spelt how they are pronounced, and the same phoneme can be represented by a variety of letter combinations.

One of the first things I recall writing at primary school used the word “wiv” multiple times.

To my shame, my Achilles’ heel in English is capitalization.

I have no problem with beginning a sentence with a capital, nor with capitalizing the pronoun “I”.

A fairly recent piece of knowledge is not to capitalize articles, prepositions nor coordinating conjunctions in title case.

The problem is proper nouns, and another commonly encountered lie.

This lie typically runs something like “Capitalization is simple, simply capitalize proper nouns!”

Firstly, most articles entirely fail to mention that there is something called a “proper adjective” too, and that these should also be capitalized, except when they are not!

Hence, it is “Italian coffee”, not “italian coffee”. A good rule of thumb is to always capitalize names of nations and nationalities. Personally, I would an advocate “all or nothing” rule that the adjective is not capitalized unless the noun is. Hence: “german sausage”, “italian coffee” and “english muffin”.

Some terms like “french fries” are no longer regarded as proper nouns, however. One source I have says “brussel sprouts”, another “Brussel(s) sprouts”!

As for the rules being simple: the US Government Printing Office Style Manual section on capitalization is 17 pages!

In Tutonish, page 55, Molee notes: “thirteen abstract rules of grammar must be studied, as to where to place the capitals, so that only learned grammarians can employ them correctly at all times. this extra time and mental energy is so much taken away from other more needed knowledge.”

Identifying a proper noun is fairly simple when it is a given name or part of it is a given name.

Capitalization can clarify, such as the grammar joke about the difference between “Helping Uncle Jack off a horse” and “Helping uncle jack-off a horse”.

Place names are fairly clear, until we start using adjectives such as north, south, central etc. A trick here is to replace the compass direction in the phrase with a term such as “southern”. Consider “I know south New York and am from the South Bronx”. The first “south” is a common adjective indicating part of New York, while the second is an integral part of a place name.

Family positions such as mother, uncle etc are capitalized when the preceding part of a title, or when used to substitute for a name.

The key word to remember when trying to identify a proper noun or adjective is “specific”.

There are many people in the world, but “John Smith” is a specific individual (even though there are thousands of people of the same name).

I will admit, I remain uncertain about some areas. “The cowboy fires his Colt.” is clear.

Colt is the name of a specific company, derived from the name of a specific individual. “Colt” here is a contraction of the name of a specific gun model, such as “Colt Peacemaker”.

By the same criteria, it is “Armalite” rather than “armalite”.

But what about “claymore” as in “claymore mine”? Claymore, the sword, is probably not a proper noun. It is a subcatergory of sword, but not really a specific model or trademark.

Claymore the mine is a specific model of mine, but the term is also used for other models that work in a similar fashion. And is a military name a trademark or specific label?

My fallback of clarity and comprehension has only limited use when it comes to capitalization.

Capitalization has very little relevance to spoken English. You cannot hear a word is capitalized when written. The only example that I can think of works in the reverse direction, as in when we use capitals to represent a certain word is stressed, such as “…the judge really IS a donkey!”

To confuse matters, the capitalization rules of other languages are different to those of English.

German capitalizes all nouns. Other languages and alphabets use different systems or do not bother at all.

Although an advocate of a German-based conlang, Molee was in favour of discarding capitals entirely.

Capitals are a visual, rather than a verbal element of communication. This needs to be kept in mind if we are ever going to simplify and rationalize capitalization for English and conlangs.

Does it matter if I write “karate” rather than “Karate”, or if I wrote “Claymore Mine, Claymore mine or claymore mine”? In all variants the meaning is clear.

On the other hand, “Polish” and “polish” have different meanings, and even differing pronunciations.

“Save the Earth!” has a different meaning to “Save the earth! (Grandad wants it to plant some cuttings)”

“Grammar Essentials for Dummies” remarks that capitalization is more about tradition than logic, which gives us a hint on the right direction to take.

New capitalization rules need to be simple, consistent, brief and geared towards clarity and comprehension.

We need to look at European languages using the Latin alphabet that make less use of capitals than English or German.

Capitalization rules are generally neglected by most conlangs. The only exception that I can think of is Lingua Franca Nova.

What to do in the meantime?

Articles on capitalization will sometimes tell you, “If in doubt, look it up”.

This would be good advice, except most on-line dictionaries do not identify proper nouns, or worse, are inconsistent.

Unless you are bound by a particular style guide, my suggestion is to observe the suggestions given for capitalization in the Wikipedia Manual of Style.

This has the merit that it is easily accessible any time one has an internet connection.

Writer's Web provides this quick reference, although some style points may differ from the Wikipedia Manual of Style.