Yes, but the relationship between oldstyle and modern numbers is nothing like the relationship between lowercase and uppercase characters. You don’t change oldstyle numbers to modern, depending on context. Number styles are font-dependent, not context-dependent.
Which would also apply to Sapo’s joke about upper-case numbers.
Since the number hijack seems to have taken hold, What is the name for those numbers with the odd ascenders and descenders? Old style, French style? Is it way too pompous to use them outside of overpriced menus? I have always liked those.
Text figures, lowercase figures, old-style figures, ranging figures, or hanging figures. (Note that they are “figures,” not “numbers.” The numbers are what they are used to represent.)
“French-style” is a particular subset in which the 3 is ascending instead of descending.
There’s nothing pompous at all about them. They’re used in many professionally typeset situations, especially books. They’re less common in scientific or technical uses, because for those it’s preferred to have numbers that line up exactly.
I can tell you that the local English-language newspapers will start the sentences with lowercase, such as: “iPod sales hit the roof last month” or “eBay has announced …”
My username is in lowercase simply so that it’s easier for me to type when I log in. I don’t care if anyone makes it uppercase if it is used in a sentence.
The general rule of academic writing is to ask (the instructor, journal editor, etc.). I once took a class where the professor insisted on specific margins, and you could lose points for having too wide or too narrow margins. There’s nothing ungrammatical about having margins other than one inch.
Citation rules, such as HOW and WHEN you must cite, may differ depending on the context of your work (for what class, journal, etc.). None is inherently better to such an extent that you can just say that it’s the superior rule and can be applied everywhere.
If this were an English composition course, you probably would have been asked to change “mRNA samples were taken at intervals of 10 minutes.” to “The researcher took samples of mRNA at intervals of 10 minutes.”, etc.
Interesting. The Associated Press Style Guide does call for capitalization of eBay and iPod when at a beginning of a sentence. For those examples, I don’t think it’s that big a deal, but MRNA does look goofy.
Link to wikipedia on old style numbers, just because I was curious. The page on Hoefler Text has the numbers in the image, without the distracting lines in the first link.
Those are seen mainly in the Business section, but Thailand does have a telecommunications satellite called iPSTAR, written exactly like that. It makes it into the regular news a lot, especially since the company that owns it is owned by the prime minister who was booted out in the last military coup, in 2006. Actual example sentence from last August: “iPSTAR currently provides broadband satellite services in 12 countries in the region.” So there you have a word that is lowercase for the first letter, then all uppercase for the rest, even at the beginning of a sentence. Exactly the reverse of normal.
Is it this company? It appears they’re IPSTAR on their own website.
Not that it really matters–capitalization rules for these sorts of things vary based on in-house style guides. So, while AP may say “EBay” to start a sentence, plenty of journalistic publications will make their own modifications of the AP Style Manual (or follow another style manual). “Teenager,” for example, was a common change to AP style followed by most newsrooms in the US. Up until fairly recently, AP insisted on hyphenating it “teen-ager.” I don’t know when the change happened, but it was still “teen-ager” in the late 90s.
Yeah, Thaicom. Looks like they’re “IPSTAR” in some places on the website and “ipstar” on others. But the convention in the local press is “iPSTAR.” In both of the English-language dailies, the Bangkok Post and The Nation.
The Chicago Manual of Style specifically says that the words are already capitalized, and thus should not be capitalized again. I remember being taught that on this very board.
Wikipedia’s current policy is to use normal capitalization rules, unless a majority of reliable sources use the modified version. They definitely cannot use a capitalization that doesn’t exist, as that would be original research.
Being a Biology major, I’d have to say that your lecturer won’t mind which way you use it.
Yes. That change came with (so far as I know) the 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style, which came out in August 2010. The rule is in 8.153: “Brand names that begin with a lowercase letter followed by a capital letter now retain the lowercase letter even at the beginning of a sentence or a heading.”
I don’t have the full CMS in front of me, so somebody should check. How does “mRNA” fit into this (not being a brand name, and all.) I suspect they probably didn’t consider cases such as that, but probably would be in favor of keeping it lowercase, now that words like eBay and iPhone can be lowercase to start a sentence.
The way I see it, if a word is such that it would override the default rules and have capitals in the middle of a sentence, then it also overrides the default rules at the beginning of a sentence.