Talk:Capitalization

In Latin and ancient Greek, only proper nouns are capitalized.

How is this possible, in a script without minuscule?

Contents

1 Titles 2 slight contradiction with the french one 3 Languages that capitalize all nouns 4 Major reordering

Titles

I followed the Wiki motto — be bold! — and added a section on (English) titles, based on several decades of observations of library, music publishing, and other cultural practices. I imagine it will generate some controversy. I invite comments, suggestions, and criticisms. -- Jeff Q 14:05, 5 Jun 2004 (UTC)

slight contradiction with the french one

"In French, accents are sometimes dropped from the uppercase letter of a capitalized word: l'Etat."

I now quote the French one De l'usage des majuscules (http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_l%27usage_des_majuscules):

"Les majuscules et les capitales s'écrivent en principe avec les accents et autres diacritiques, au même titre que les minuscules.": Uppercase letters in principle take accents the same way as lowercase letters.

It is not "sometimes" it is dropped and "sometimes" not, it is just due to the problem of typing accents on uppercase letters with the first typewriters. However the rule is: "capitalized letters also take accents" - (unsigned)

Some people put the accents on capital letters, and some don't. That's pretty much the definition of "sometimes", isn't it? - Nunh-huh 05:41, 5 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Of course not. That's like saying that "friend" is sometimes spelled "freind" because some people spell it that way. The only relevant question here is whether they're correct in so doing.

Languages that capitalize all nouns

The article currently claims that various other languages besides German capitalize all nouns. I know that Danish did this as well before the 1950s, but what other languages do this today? Or is this statement simply wrong and should be removed (especially considering it was added originally by someone who also claimed, wrongly, that French also does that)? -- Markus Kuhn 19:24, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've also thought this was odd but I'm not an expert. I have heard that other Germanic languages formerly did this. Can you find a more exact date for Danish, and is it mentioned on the Danish page? Also, does anybody know whether it was also formerly done in Afrikaans, Dutch, Flemish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Swedish, or any of the less well-known languages? It would also be nice to know when each language stopped doing it and if it was part of a larger spelling reform. — Hippietrail 03:08, 10 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I've included year 1948 for Danish changeover based on [1] (http://www.ku.edu/~germanic/germanhomepage/languagedescription.htm) says

• "German is the only language in which all nouns begin with a capital letter."
• "Before 1948 the å was written aa [in Danish]. The spelling reform of that year also abolished the German practice of beginning all nouns with a capital letter". Joestynes 07:18, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)

It seems that Norwegian used to capitalise all nouns but abolished the practice before Danish. It seems to be part of the 1907 reform but as with all things relating to language in Norway it appears not to be so simple. It looks like either the 1906 reform or at least the capitalisation part wasn't really embraced and made standard until perhaps 1939. Finding direct details is very hard on the net but this helps: http://www.naha.stolaf.edu/publications/volume27/vol27_5.htm - about a Norwegian newspaper publish in the USA:

• "In 1939, the paper introduced a spelling reform to bring its orthography into line with the 1907 changes in written Norwegian. These changes, however, ignored the much more substantial reforms adopted in Norway in 1917 and 1938. Decorah-Posten continued to capitalize nouns until 1961 ..."

— Hippietrail 03:41, 23 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Didn't English also do this at one time? I seem to remember seeing things written in 1600s or so that were written so. -208.62.152.236 19:08, 18 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Major reordering

Apologies for smuggling some substantive additions into what is otherwise a (major) reordering of the material. My justification is that, I wanted to add some items, but other than the long miscellaaneous list, there didn't seem anywhere to put them; so I've redistributed the miscellany into the main paragraphs. I hope it gives a less English-centric article. The points I've added are:

• aka title case, with discussion of Unicode titlecase characters (Croatian, polytonic Greek) (titlecase redirects here).
• readded Dutch U with qualification "occasionally", and note on "van" - from Dutch wikipedia.
• English surnames like ffoulkes with lowercase
• example honorifics/titles
• vocative O
• Irish initial mutation
• Generalise about digraph/ligatures Joestynes 07:18, 22 Apr 2005 (UTC)