Aside from the “rules of grammar” that most of us learned in school, specifically relating to capitalization of proper names, first words in a sentence, and so on is there really a logical reason for caps? I still use them pretty much all the time out of habit more than anything else but am I off the wall here? Do you really get anything from a capitol letter than you don’t get from context? “his name was joe.” or “His name was Joe.” “last month i watched the movie “the cube” with vincent dinofrio.” or “Last month I watched the movie “The Cube” with Vincent DiNofrio.”. Oh I’m certain there are some cases where we use caps to designate something specific such as the periodic table, and in some computer structures, but linguisticly is it still nessisary?
I’m not calling for reform, just a contemplative debate on the matter. Is there something I have missed? Would you object greatly if they stopped teaching caps in school? If so, why? Tradition?
I know this may seem silly in light of the weighty matters usually found in GD and I considered posting it in GQ or IMHO but I don’t have a simple rock solid opinion regarding it and I do think that a debate can be made in regards to it either way (I was actually up late last night debating it with myself), so here it is in GD.
Anyhow, I do hope that some of you can join in this and take it as a light hearted and friendly debate as it is intended. I look forward to your responses.
Capitalization does matter because it provides an important visual signpost to written text. In English, we capitalize proper nouns (names) and the first word of a new sentence. Granted, our habits are a little different from Germans, who capitalize all common nouns, but not pronouns (other than “Ich”). The important factor is consistency. Without a compelling reason to reconsider our current rule, changing it would cause a significant level of confusion and irritation among readers without any redeeming factors.
When a mistake like mis-capitalization occurs in common text, it produces visual “noise”. From my experience in technical writing, more than one error every five pages is simply unacceptable. When you get to the abysmal depths of five errors a page, there is so much noise that many readers will give up - either out of frustration or because they have lost respect for the writer. Considering the state of literacy today, we need all the help we can get. We should, therefore, strive for more consistency and accuracy, not less.
well, i’m not french so i don’t hold my own language so high, since it is such a hodge-podge of german construction and latin roots, but i don’t have a problem with caps. in handwriting i use all caps, but upper and lowercase caps based on size. sort of like the copperplate font. well, exactly like it i suppose.
being relatively new to the sdmb i have never made such a judgement before, but i see this moving to imho…
Capitalization really improves the readidibility of a text. When reading, you don’t actually look at each word individually; you look at the sentence as a whole. Capitalization maeks it mch easier to distinguish where each sentence starts. Also, note that capitalization is also used for acronyms like SDMB. When you see something like “SDMB”, your brain goes to the “acronym area” of your memory to figure out hat it means. When you see “sdmb”, your brain first goes to the “wrd area” of brain, has to search it until it realized it isn’t there, then has to figure where else to look. So it allows much greater speed in reading.
It also adds redunancy. This is very important, because all natural languages (i.e., not tuff like Pascal or mathemtics) are subject to ambiguities, and require redundancies to compensate. It’s easy to look at a particular redundancy, and say Oh, we don’t need that", but if we got rid of everthig like that we’d be in trouble. Take for instance your example “I saw ‘The Cube’”. Sure, “I saw ‘the cube’” isn’t too hard to read, but a lot of people ignore the need for quote marks. If someone says “I saw the cube”, are you going to be able to know what they mean?
At a speed-reading course once, not only did they teach us to read in “chunks” rather than word by word, but they also showed how the brain reads the “top half” of a character when reading at speed. The eyes flick across the top of letters, and pick out capitalisations as signals (much as The Ryan said).
I think its a lot easier where most of us don’t write like e e cummings.
All enlightening! Congratulations. Classical Romans made do with Latin which didn’t have the articles a, an, or the. Sentences had no end, no spaces or punctuation marks were yet imagined.
ISTHATNOTAMAZINGORSOMETHING
That’s correct. The only time pronouns are capitalised (except at the beginning of a sentence) is when you write a letter and use Sie, Ihr, Ihre etc. (you, your, …). It is a form of politeness and also serves to distinguish Ihr (your) from ihr (their), as there are times when pronouns of different cases will take the same form.
Anyway, back to the OP:
I can’t find a cite right now but I have read about a study that was done in the Netherlands (where capitalisation rules are similar to English). Dutch students were given a Dutch text written as per German capitalisation rules. The result of the study was that a German-style capitalised text is better to read because the reader can easier make out certain words that belong together. Unfortunately I can’t remember the details but the gist of it was that within the sentence structure there are word groups that belong together and are always is a certain order that relates to the sense of the sentence. With capitalisation of nouns these word groups can be more easily distinguished.
Whatever linguistic case can be made for uppercase, it has the unfortunate side effect of allowing for case sensitivity, which of course, is the spawn of the devil.
a wiseass said, “if yould debate with me, we must first define our terms.”
so, for erislover, there is no such term as “upper and lowercase caps.” The way you write is using caps and small caps. and just for good measure, typesetters never ever said upper case to mean caps. trust me on this; i spent my life in printing business.
for zen101, thank you for educing so many dumb responses.
and for december: yep i well remember archy and mehitabel, and that several of archy’s nightly entries were all caps because he hit the cap lock key by a poorly aimed dive from platen to keyboard.
now that we’ve defined our terms, let this GD run apace as errantly and goofily only possible on this site and in congress!
Hrm … I thought the ancient Roman inscriptions on their buildings had spaces (or at least raised dots) between the Latin words. Although the words were in all-caps.
