It seems to me the rules on capitalization are changing. I am all in favor of it myself. I have long held that capitalizing random nouns is a holdover from German. Now the New York Times and professionally-edited books are capitalizing less.
But in a book yesterday, I came across “Belgian army.” Surely that is wrong. The Belgian Army is a unique thing. I would always set it with two capitals.
Can there be any justification for doing otherwise?
According to Wikipedia, the proper name of the institution, in Dutch, is the Landcomponent, whereas the Dutch word for “army” would be leger.
I would make it dependent on whether it’s an official name of the institution, or a literal translation of an official name in another language. Hence “British Army” (which really is called that in British official terminology), but “Belgian Army”. The fact that there is only one of them in the world is, in my view, not enough to capitalise it, but for things of which only one exists it’s likely that its name is a proper name and hence capitalised on these grounds.
I don’t believe it has anything to do with German. 17th and 18th century English texts often have a lot of capitalization that we wouldn’t use today.
Capitalization of English and German probably have a common earlier source in capitalization introduced to Latin texts and then transferred to other languages. This tended to be dropped over time in English and extended in German.
Not “random” as far as I was taught. It’s “proper nouns” that get a capital letter.
A proper noun is a specific (i.e., not generic) name for a particular person, place, or thing. Proper nouns are always capitalized in English, no matter where they fall in a sentence. Because they endow nouns with a specific name, they are also sometimes called proper names .
So is there any situation where “The Belgian army” is correct?
I am no expert but I think not. “Belgian Army” is a specific thing/entity. A Belgian may well refer to “the army” but the meaning is inferred not specific. One would not write Belgian Bus Drivers, or Begian Farmers though.
If you are writing about armies in the generic sense, and nationalities are a minor detail, then lower-case would be appropriate.
Can you provide an example?
I’m with mbh: it would be possible to want to discuss an army of Belgians rather than the specific institution, in which case the lower case is fine for “army”. For most practical purposes, of course, initial caps for both would be expected, but it might well not be wrong to use the lower case. Depends on the context of what OP was reading originally.
(I had quite a beef with The Guardian about all this when they suddenly started dropping initial caps, and some designer was quoted as saying they made the page look untidy, or some such tomfoolery. It took some effort to point out that “the Home Office” and “the Foreign Secretary” meant something different from their lower case equivalents)
“The news was nearly as grim in Belgium, where the Luftwaffe had bombed military installations and leveled entire villages; the Belgian army had fought bravely but had been decimated.”
– Watching Darkness Fall: FDR, His Ambassadors, and the Rise of Adolf Hitler
David McKean
So is this sentence correct? The British navy is called the Royal Navy
Note that author uses “Luftwaffe”, the untranslated German official name for the German air force. If the author uses capitalized untranslated official names for various national armed forces in some instances, and uses lower case generic names for national armed forces in other cases, that seems to me like a stylistic choice, and a defensible one.
In the sentence you cite, “Luftwaffe” is the actual name of the German air force. “Belgian army” refers the the army of Belgium, it’s not the actual name of the service, so “army” isn’t capitalized. I think that’s a pretty subtle distinction, and I don’t think it would be wrong to write “Belgian Army”, either, but I can see the argument for “Belgian army”.
Is this consistent in the rest of the work? Does he refer to the 1) “Heer”, 2) “German army”, or 3) “German Army”? If he uses 1) or 2) or a combination of them, then I think he’s applying a consistent and defensible stylistic rule. If he uses 3), then, yeah, “Belgian army” should be “Belgian Army”.
The author is not consistent.
“Stalin stood again: 'To the health and prosperity and happiness and triumphs of the American Army and Navy.” It is not clear how Stalin used a capital letter in speech.
On the other hand he does use “Royal Air Force” when using his own voice.
Yes, it is, because there is no entity called “the British navy”.
“The Belgian Army” would be correct when referring to the land forces of Belgium as a whole. But an “Army” can have many armies in it. So “a Belgian army” could be attacking somewhere while “The Belgian Army” was in near-total retreat. This is not contradictory in any way.
This is really a matter of style, so there is no “right” answer. One might take one of many positions, all valid:
(1) Regardless of what the proper name of the institution is, “Belgian army” is always correct, because it’s an army that is Belgian, and it is clear from context that there is really only one logical entity that is meant.
(2) The Belgian army or Belgian government officially translates is name into “Belgian Army,” so “Belgian Army” is correct (provided that this is a true statement).
(3) “Belgian Army” is correct because it the closest possible translation of the official name of the institution into English (provided that this is a true statement)
(4) “Belgian Army” is correct because it is the form that governments and institutions that use English as an official language use (provided that this is a true statement)
(5) Our style is that we use the form “X army”/“army of X”/etc. for the name of every nation-state’s land-based military force.
(6) Our style is that we use the form “X Army”/“Army of X”/etc. for the name of every nation-state’s land-based military force.
How about “The British and U.S. navies held a joint exercise?”
So, The British navy prevailed at Trafalgar is preferable to The British Navy prevailed at Trafalgar?
As per my cite in post 2, the official name of the institution is the Landcomponent, which, helpfully enough, translates in English as “Land Component”.