In mainstream America and mainstream usage of the English language I think it is always standard practice to capitalize the first letter only of all personal names including first names and family names, with rare exceptions that are special (such as “e. e. cummings” or “ADELE”).
Is this different in other languages or other cultures, when writing names in the English alphabet?
I know Spanish uses far fewer capital letters than English, for example, but this does not seem to be the case for personal names.
Is it ever a sign of disrespect to capitalize the first letter of somebody’s name in a list, if they have written it entirely in lowercase? Especially, a sign of cultural or linguistic obliviousness?
[P.S. sorry for typo in title, I meant “Are there…”!]
Dutch has some intricate rules about capitalizing prepositions and articles in last names - eg. van, ter, ten, de, van der, van den, etc.
When preceded by a first name, there’s no capital: Jan van Kampen. Jan Van Kampen is wrong. But when preceded by something other than a first name, for instance ‘mevrouw’ (Mrs.) or ‘meneer’ (Mr.) , there *is *a capital: Daar loopt meneer Van Kampen - there goes Mr. Van Kampen.
My firstname’s full form is four words, of which only the first and fourth are capitalized; this is pretty common for multi-word firstnames in Spanish (names like Francisco de Asís or María de las Mercedes, where the whole thing is a single name). My parental lastname is three words, of which the second one is not capitalized: it is in the form Apellidofrecuente de Sitio (Commonlastname from Place), relatively frequent in some parts of northern Spain.
In general, if a part of a name happens to be a preposition or article, it will not be capitalized in Spanish.
In German, all proper nouns are capitalized, but where a preposition is a part of a name, it is not. To do so would be a faux pas. For example:
Manfred von Richthofen OK
Manfred Von Richthofen Ignorant Auslander
The “von” means this person is nobility, so the Engish equivalent would be “Manfred of Richthofen”. I believe if you were to look him up in a correct German alphabetical list, he should correctly be under R instead of V. But at my work (in the US), the Outlook Adddress book puts all the “von-” names under V with both upper and lowercase "V"s.
There’s also names like Ursula von der Leyen. File under L, not V or D.
I have seen documents (I think written in Flemish or something Germanic) where the convention was to fully capitalise the surname of the individual (i.e. John SMITH) - but I am not sure if this was just the writing style for the sort of documents I was looking at (archaeological reports).
I have seen that standard applied to romanized Chinese names. Presumably this is for the benefit of westerners who, between unfamiliarity with Chinese names in general and different ordering conventions, would not immediately know which name is the surname.
In Welsh, there are a few digraphs which are counted as a single letter. Rarely, both of these are capitalized. I know a woman called LLinos, for example. In the traditional surnames, “ap” and “ferch” (originally nouns meaning “son” (mab) and “daughter” (merch)) are not capitalized. In general, though, capitalization follows English.
In English, ff- names are traditionally not capitalized, as the double-lowercase-F is just a stylized rendition of a fancy capital F in the first place. Can’t find a cite for this, so I may be wrong.
This is quite common in Africa (I have seen it especially in francophone countries), where depending on ethnicity the surname can come in various positions. Capitalization enables you to tell which name is regarded as the surname.
Here’s a bit of baseball trivia – in the season just ended, the New York Mets had three players in their lineup who had surnames beginning with a lower-case letter: Travis d’Arnaud, Matt den Dekker, and Jacob deGrom. All three wwere in the starting lineup on August 23.
English capitalized nouns up until the 18th century. Look at the US Constitution, nearly all the nouns are capitalized. But in the Declaration of Independence, some are, but most are not.
Capitalizing surnames (don’t say last names) in East Asian or Hungarian names solves two problems - dumb people assuming Smith John must be Mr. John, as well as smart but overthinking people assuming that the order is the other way. And then it gets swapped multiple times. I have also seen the capitalization in French names. I have no idea why they do that. It doesn’t hurt though. I have also noticed it in US military personnel. I don’t know if it’s a particular branch or if I was seeing patterns that don’t exist.
I don’t have a right to tell anytone how to spell their name but I must admit that I die inside a little when I see someone spell their own name like “Mcdonald.”
Well, their family was formerly noble. If you were born before 1919 you *might *get away with claiming the von has a significance beyond being part of your name; otherwise it’s putting on airs. Nowadays you can become a German noble if you have an ego and lots of money.
Thanks! I always felt there was a valid reason why part of my name is spelled (correctly) as … van. It also looks pretty, typographically, and confuses the bejeezus out of computers
