Why Do Names Start With Capital Letters?
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- Опубліковано 21 лип 2024
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SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
15 Everyday Things You Never Realised Are So Weird: www.scoopwhoop.com/inothernew...
Capitalisation: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital...
Why Do names Start With Capital Letters?: www.quora.com/Why-do-names-st...
Why Do We Use Capital & Lowercase Letters?: www.dictionary.com/e/capitals/
Why Does English Have Capital Letters?: painintheenglish.com/case/4334
Why Are There Upper & Lowercase Letters?: www.wonderopolis.org/wonder/w....
Mocking Spongebob: knowyourmeme.com/memes/mockin...
Uncial: www.britannica.com/topic/uncial
Carolingian Minuscule: www.britannica.com/art/Caroli...
Why Gen Z Made Capitalisation Irrelevant: / why-gen-z-made-capital...
Now you’ve watched this video here’s a question for you. How many capitals would the sentence “the man with no eyes is called steve” have in sentence case, title case (with and without including minor words), all caps case, and in Old English? ANSWERS BELOW!
Sentence case: 2
Title Case (including minor words): 8
Title case (not including minor words): 6
All caps: 29
Old English: 4 (the nouns of man, eyes, and Steve plus the at the start)
PS These answers may be wrong. I had the idea to do this a minute before the video went live lol
And camel case: 7: theManWithNoEyesIsCalledSteve
In Hebrew, we don't have capital letters but we do have 2 different writing styles
K'tav (meaning hand write)
&
D'fus (meaning print)
i let you guess when we use which
we should abolish capital letters! reply #abolishcapitalletters if u agree
Wouldn't Old English be 0? I don't believe the runes had a lowercase/uppercase distinction... Even when scribes adapted the latin script, I don't believe they had any consistent rules.
Wikipedia, the infallable source of all human knowledge that can't possibly be wrong (\s), seems to agree. Note that the time of the printing press is early modern English, not Old English.
From: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English
"Old English did not have a distinction between uppercase and lowercase, and at best had embossed or decorated letters indicating sections. Middle English capitalization in manuscripts remained haphazard, and was often done for visual aesthetics more than grammar; in poetry, the first letter of each line of verse is often capitalized. With the development of the printing press in Europe and England capitalization of initial letters and proper nouns became more regularized, perhaps partly to distinguish new sentences in a time where punctuation remained sparse and irregularly used. The plays of Shakespeare show capitalization both of new lines and sentences, proper nouns, and some significant common nouns and verbs."
@@YoniIsrael It is fairly rare for writing systems to differ in their handwritten and printed forms. But for systems decended from the Phoenician Abjad (from which the Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arab systems decended) it's more the norm than not. Arabic is the only one that I can think of, where the printed form emulates the handwritten form.
Think all the different handwriting styles for the Latin (and Greek and Cyrillic) alphabets: Cursive, block lettering, black lettering, "standard" handwritten, etc. For print there's book style, monospaced, sans-serif, etc.
Strange capitalization rule:
The Amazon River.
The Mississippi River.
The Amazon and Mississippi rivers.
I see nothing strange tho. 🤔🤔🤔
@@Xaiff One might expect "The Amazon and Mississippi Rivers".
@@columbus8myhw Well, no, because _rivers_ is there a description.
@@qwertyTRiG Language doesn't always follow logic, but based on those capitalisation rules how wrong it seems to me to write this down or say it... what about: "The Amazon River and Mississippi River rivers."?
@@extrastuff9463 That's a bit more redundancy than I'm comfortable with.
The only notable thing in my language is that Zulu grammar tends to "agglutinate" words. So, sometimes you get capital letters in the middle of words.
To illustrate, in an instance in English where something that functions as a "phrase" would be a few separate words, the Zulu translation would put some words together. For example, "the dog is hungry" in English is four separate words, but translated into Zulu, it is "inja ilambile" which is only two words. What has happened is that the phrase agglutinated into "thedog ishungry"
So, when you have a proper name (place name, personal name, etc.) somewhere in the middle of a phrase, you may get something like "Kuyabanda eThekwini" which in English is "It is cold in *Durban) " in English. The agglutination is something like "Itiscold inDurban".
*Durban is a South African city.
Fascinating; thank you for sharing!
The only place I can think of this being used in English is with names like McDonald, where Mc means "son of", putting the capital D in Donald in the middle of the word
I AM NOT YELLING I AM JUST WRITING LIKE A 1ST CENTURY ROMAN WOULD
You should add punctuation, making it : I AM NOT YELLING, I AM JUST WRITING LIKE A 1ST CENTURY ROMAN WOULD.
Lies, you just used a "J" and multiple "U"s and "W"s. Disqualified.
Hi JUST WRITING LIKE A 1ST CENTURY ROMAN WOULD, I'm Paul.
IAMNOTYELLINCIAMIVSTRITINCLIKEAISTCENTVRYROMANOVLD
WHAT IS U THAT YOV ARE VSING
my language is german so all nouns are capitalized. Also when adressing someone in the politeform "Sie" or "Ihr" are capitalized, as was the informal "Du" once, but that is slowly faded
That’s why I find German so much easier to learn than English (even though I’m a native English speaker). German is consistent across the board, if it’s a noun, it’s be capitalized (and if it’s a common noun it can be made into a monstrous word, like „Rechtschultzversicherrungsgesellschaften”)
Since we're on the subject of diminishing capitalization, I'm curious what not capitalizing a noun in German comes across as. Like you said, I know it's the proper thing to do, but I'd guess people don't do it 100% of the time, either mistakes or lazy or whatever, so just curious what the perception might be.
@@GarceusLegend Well, I personally, speaking for myself, always take care to capitalize nouns, cause it really looks weird and out of place if you don't do it...well, except for everyday language like text messages online or with friends. There, it is pretty common that everything's written without capital letters, cause it's easier and faster. In some cases, however, there are words that are written without capitals by many although they should be. E.g. the nominalized verbs like "the walking" = "das Gehen" are often written without the capital letter, although it should be. Also, there are some cases where it's not even clear if it should be written capitalized or not. With regular nouns it clearly looks out of place to not capitalize them, but in some cases, there is some confusion.
@@Gandalf-fe3gw German as well. in some cases, the capitalization of nouns is an important distinguishing feature. I.e. "Sie ist gut zu Vögeln." vs. "Sie ist gut zu vögeln." For non-German speakers: "She is nice to birds." vs. "She is nice to f*ck." It's an extreme example but illustrates the necessity perfectly.
@@andypre1667 That's just... ...astonishing
In Portuguese, we don't use capital letters for the names of the months, the days of the week, and the names of languages, like we do in English.
Same with Estonian, Finnish, Russian, from the languages that I know!
It WiLl bE UsEd iN ThE cOMmeNt SecTiON bEcAusE I SAid iT
ImpOSibLe
n
For someone who studies language for fun, I never thought about the connection between “inch” and “ounce”.
I suppose both ultimately come from _unguis_ the word for fingernail.
And by coincidence, there are 12 inches in a foot, and 12 Troy ounces in a Troy pound (used to weigh coins and precious metals; the Troy ounce is larger than an Avoirdupois ounce and the Troy pound smaller than the 16- ounce Avoirdupois pound, used to weigh everything else).
Not exactly accurate. The minuscule letters were used more often, meaning printers needed more of them, so the case was larger and heavier, therefore it was easier to place at a lower shelf height. Where the majuscule letters could be placed on a higher shelf without too much strain. Both cases (the boxes) were constantly being used, roughly equal.
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian script : use letter-case
Hanzi, Kanji, Kana, Hangul, Arabic script, Devanagari, and any other Asian writing system : *we don't do that here.*
_this is all Phoenicians' fault_
Modern Greek has upper and lower case, and I think this started with Medieval Greek:
Νυνι δε μένει πιστις, ελπίς, αγάπη, τα τρία ταύτα, μείζον δε τούτων η αγάπη. - I Corinthians 13:13
@@allanrichardson1468 yes it does.
Kana also has 2 systems: Hiragana and Katakana. Though it is almost never used at the same time in a single word.
@@EanaHufwe ピタっとマーク
I speak Spanish as a second language, and I've noticed that Spanish still capitalizes most proper nouns, like English, but certain proper nouns, like language names and demonyms, don't get capitalized. For example, England would be written "Inglaterra" in Spanish, but English is just "inglés".
The title case "The Long Good Friday" is ambiguous as "Good Friday" can be either the proper noun of a religious holiday or "good Friday".
Welcome to the English language.
Damián "el Salsuero" that’s unpossible
Wait, “Good Friday” is a religious holiday? Never heard of it... but then again, I’m neither religious nor living in the US, and I didn’t even hear of the movie till today.
What About Those Weird People Of Discord, Who Write All Words In A Sentences With Upper Case On The First Letter?
they always look like song titles
"What About Those Weird People Of Discord, Who Write All Words In A Sentence With Upper Case Letters" by the Mountain Goats
It Conveys A Tone Of Annunciating Every Word.
@@cursedalien 👏Like👏the👏clap👏emoji👏on👏Twitter👏
It just looks better
@@FrozenCascade It looks terrible with all those articles and prepositions capitalized. It makes me think the writer either never bothered to learn the standard or doesn't care about nuance.
Capital letters really only exist in Europe, and for the most part, only in three alphabets - Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek.
Fun note: all three alphabets have a capital letter that looks like H, but different corresponding lowercases: Hh, Нн, and Ηη respectively.
different pronunciations, too. /h/, /x/, and /i/, respectively
@@broccoliflorette1970 The second one is /n/, not /x/.
@@flirora Oh, yeah, Х is /x/
Cyrillic seems to generally have very little difference between upper and lower case, while italic Cyrillic looks like a completely different alphabet.
So the ad I got on this video was “Do you know where the capital “A” in Chick-fil-A comes from?” And I was shook. Name Explain content even extends to the ads
2:27, Remember, these rules are specific to English. For example, in German „Meine Katze heißt Larry“, you will notice that the word for cat, „Katze“, is capitalized, even though it’s a common noun.
I can't wait for Apple's response to Google Glass - the iPatch.
Sean -Chesthole- Osman 👏👏👏👏👏👏
Doctor's handwriting:
I am 4 parallel universes ahead of you
*doctors' handwriting
Tom Peled *Doctors’
Pharmacists must take a special course to decode prescriptions.
The whole lowercase and uppercase etymolgy is the kind of knowledge gems I love about this channel. Never knew this. Glad to be a patron!
THiS iS cALled spoNGECASe
I know this as a pokemon talk :P
I pReFeR gAmZeEcAsE, bRoThEr.
@@jarlfenrir dArK mAtTeR cAsE
It's Klingon
@@GustawStudios23 ThAt ToO
At an ISP I worked years ago, we had the habit of pronouncing capital letters-for example, when reading out a password-in a louder, higher-pitched voice. =D
I used to work in linguistics publications back in the days of IBM Selectric typewriters. During a proofreading session, one of us would read from the original copy and pronounce acronyms with a lower voice, italics with a higher voice, and italicized acronyms in a "low falsetto." It sped up the process as long as we didn't crack up too much.
i do this because im lazy
I dO tHiS bEcAuSe I jOkE
IDOTHISBECOUSEIAMAROMANSCRIBE
I do this because i dont know what should i comment
idothisbecauseimlostmyhashtag
I Do This Because It Makes Very Word Look Important
@@bangbangintotheroom691 NOITLOOKSLIKEYOURTRYINGTOSHOUTBUTYOUDONTWANTYOURMOMTOHEAR
One other recent use of capital letters is when writing software source code. In order to make the code easier to understand, things like function names describe what the function does. For example, a function that returns the sum of two numbers could be called: "add two numbers". However, most programming languages don't allow spaces in names. One option is to use _ (- is usually reserved for the subtraction): add_two_numbers. Capital letters are often used: AddTwoNumbers or addTwoNumbers. Which exact format is used is either left to each programmer to choose or is set by an employer / team leader as part of coding standards.
You should do a video about the history of cursive writing and whether it should be continued in school, although I guess that wouldn’t really be a name explain.
I find it interesting, that in English you also capitalise some adjectives, like "English".
As you said, we use majuscules for all nouns in German. And i think, that's good, because there's a lot difference between these two sentences:
"Ich habe in Russland liebe Genossen" (I have nice comrades in Russia) and
"Ich habe in Russland Liebe genossen" (I have enjoyed love in Russia) ;)
Wow! That's a ig difference. How is it different when speaking rather than writing?
In swedish it works mostly like in english, except when it comes to titles of things like books or movies. In this case, only the first word have a capital letter. So, Lord of the Rings become Lord of the rings (or Sagan om ringen, to be precise).
Concerning the lacking use of capital letters on the net, I think it is merely a way because it is easier. Since this way of writing is mainly used that way in short messages, in conversations on the net, the message is there for a temporary purpose. It gets across easy enough either way.
For, say, essays and articles capital letters are more useful. It makes sense to spend more time and effort on that.
Now I know where Carl Sagan got his surname.
@@paulawashington3175 I dont know if that was a joke or a serious observation, but the word ''sagan' ( meaning 'the saga') nowdays means fairy tale. During the medieval age, however, it ment a story from what was then called the 'saga age' (the end part of the viking age) on Iceland.
patrick. my guy. we're literally just too lazy to capitalize things.
@Gastón It's only one button though, and - frankly - I'm surprised that members of the younger generation don't capabilities the appropriate letters automatically. From what I gather, most of them a taught to type, meaning - much like hand writing - spelling, punctuation, capitalisation, and grammar in typing should always be done, even if it is done purely out of muscle memory.
@Gastón I nag myself for getting grammar wrong when I spot it
@@samuellawrencesbookclub8250 Young people aren't taught to type anymore, they just learn.
given that most touchscreen keyboards default to autocorrect and autocapitalization being "on", it takes extra effort to change the caps of the initial word of a sentence or of a proper noun down into miniscule case and that kinda argues against "laziness" ... i think the miniscule used this way is to imply a familiar or more genial tone of voice--this tone seems also to be implied by the omission of a final period
actually! it’s the opposite - it takes more effort to consciously or subconsciously press the shift button
But where did our capital numbers go?
Roman numerals are capital numbers. One, because the Romans used them first, like capital letters, then came lower case letters and arabic numerals.
And two, well just look at them. I,V, X, C, D, M. They're capital numbers.
The letters we use may be roman, but our numbers come from India and the Middle East.
You use them all the time. If you were writing something in all caps and included numerals, you would use lining numbers so they don't stick out, making these essentially "uppercase numbers". You also use lining numbers in tabular data when numbers are just used by themselves. However, in regular text, you use old-style numbers, in a sense "lowercase numbers" to blend in with the ascenders and descenders and variation between capital and lowercase letter heights, etc.
@@leewaters5949 Never know that these two numeral sets had names. I always thought they just were stylistic choices of different fonts. Thank you the new info.
The numbers we use (type) are all capital. But lowercase numbers do exist, they are called Oldstyle Figures, and they are not part of ASCII - you need to use a special font to render them.
Capitalization does vary between languages. In Hungarian, there is a rule that adjectives shouldn’t be capitalized (you may find an exception with compound words tho). So while in English, you type “English”, “French” or “American”, these words would be in lowercase, since they’re adjectives. And I’m glad you mentioned lowercase typing in modern culture, especially in song titles. It’s a stylistic choice, but it does hit kinda different when you read them - from as if they were properly capitalized.
Those words are not only adjectives but also nouns, as in when referring to the people or the language.
When you are programming (Java) variables and other things start with small letters. But the capital letters are important, too. The name of a class (a file of code) starts with a capital letter. A constant is all-caps. And a variable can contain several words. But as they have to be in one part without whitespace, there have to be another instance to separate this for human eyes. For this you have the camel-case: The variable itself starts with a lower case letter, but every other word in it starts with an uppercase letter. So, the variable with the name "What should people do" becomes "whatShouldPeopleDo".
I like camel case way more than using underscores between words like create_date_time. (Tho in the end it depends on your system's standard of course. )
nebulan That would be Algol derivatives such as PL/I. COBOL uses hyphens that separate the words (and “words”) within a data-name, condition-name, procedure-name, or reserved word. But remember, COBOL was developed for systems containing only upper case, and PL/I was more commonly used on such “monocase” systems.
We have camelCase, PascalCase, snake_case, and SHOUTY_SNAKE_CASE.
The style of your videos are so great ! You are an inspiration on UA-cam ! I’ll try to make some of my videos using your style so great
Why do in english nationalities start with capital letters?
Ex: American, Spanish, etc etc
And why the heck in German you have to start ALL NAMES (PROPER OR NOT) with captal letters
Ex: Die Milch, Der Hund, etc. etc.
Correction: Die Milch, Der Hund (Die Hunde).
And answer: Why not?
@@HalfEye79 oh sorry 'bout that, German gender are waaay too wierd
Ach! Verfluchte Sweinhund!
@@koppadasao
What is a Sweinhund?
@@luizfellipe3291 A swine dog...
If you dive more into alphabets, why are the letters in a specific order? There's a lot of history about the origins of each letter, but not why K is before L, or Г before Д. By the way an "alphabet" in computer science (automata theory) is a set of letters or symbols without any order.
There is actually another application for capital letters, especially the camel case, i.e. capital letters in between words ("iPhone"). In some situations spaces cannot be used to distinguish between words. The most notable example is programming, because in programming the space separates elements of a statement. Lets say I want to name a integer variable "number of runs", I can't just write "int number of runs", because the space separates the keyword "int" from the variable name, so the variable name can't contain spaces without confusing the compiler. So it is common practice to write "int numberOfRuns" instead. This way human programmers can interpret the meaning of the variables better than with "int numberofruns" and it is still proper syntax for most programming languages.
or_you_can_go_full_Python_mode_and_use_an_underscore
Patrick: 'Head as in the most important. Not head, like the thing above your neck"
Yoda: 'No. There is another'
I was helping an Egyptian lady with setting up an English Facebook account. She always used lower-case letters. My mind was blown when I realized she doesn't know when to use capital letters because the Arabic script doesn't have that.
Lower and upper cases help with clarity, specially when quick reading is needed. Upper cases are easier to read and give emphasis. I hope they don't go away because they're important in maps and highway signs. If you read: INTERSTATE 405 SOUTH, it clearly stands out and can read it easy while either driving 60 MPH or while dodging traffic. And if you read: Wilshire Blvd WEST, it makes it clear that it's the road you're going to and the direction you'll be taking. Maybe not the best explanation but just look at how highway signs are written next time you're on the road.
Within the first 4mins I am completely captivated. Great video. I’ve wondered the same- thanks for gathering all this info :))
This next episode sounds amazing!
Fantastic video. Thankyou for this.
There is another, more recent non-standard use of capital letters called CammelCase. This is where you capitalize the first letter of component words in a compound word. One of the primary places it is used is for variable or function names in computer programs.
There are two main driving forces here. One is that the syntax rules of the language usually requires a name to be a single "word" with no spaces. The other is that you need a different name for each one, and you want to use a descriptive name to understand what the role and purpose of a variable is. Or you use it to illustrate the relationship between different entities. So you might give them names like CurrentCount, StartingCount, EndingCount.
There are lots of different variations of CammelCase, and the spread of computer literacy into general society is causing it to be used outside of its original context.
Man, I need to watch Anchorman again. The source of so many funny quotes. Speaking of it, I think "Brick" as a first name could deserve a video :)
My guess as to why today's youngsters often use only lower-case letters: To avoid pressing the "Shift" key (i.e., laziness).
Right, it's all about typing, when writing by hand capital letters take the same amount of time and effort.
What you call laziness, I call efficiency.
Damn lazy youngsters! Not like us energetic oldsters ! We have loads of energy to use the shift button!
I think it's because it comes of as more relaxed that if you capitalise the letters that you need to not laziness.
Pretty sure it's because of phones making capital letters (and apostrophes) a hassle. I like to think I type properly while using a pc as I am now, but I type like a toddler on a phone; no capitalization, and only periods and commas for punctuation.
I love Name Explain, but when I see my name in the thumbnail, I love Name Explain even more 💜💜
Another interesting capital letters function would be capitonyms which change the specific definition of a word (eg. cancer vs Cancer. An illness or a star sign). This little quirk can sometimes even be a specific mark to change the pronunciation of the word (eg. polish vs Polish. A cleaning technique or someone or something from Poland). This probably exists in other languages too but I only know of a few English examples.
4:51 talking about not capitalised letters, showing us a book where every letter is a capital letter
Oh, you should link to the Useful Charts channel, or even collaborate with him. I love his work.
Some words in Irish have initial consonant mutations, depending on the word. The initial mutation is never capitalised, even if it is on the start of a word that starts with a capital; so you get words starting with lower case letters, followed by a capital letter. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations
For Example:
Gallimh - Galway
i nGallimh - in Galway
Anglicised Irish second names also have odd capitalisation, your Mc/Mac- and O'- names are all titles, so they are capitalised, along with the family name. In Irish, there is a space between the title and the family name/clan name (A similar thing can be seen in the Norman tiles used in Ireland, like Fitz- , where the name part will be capitalised in some cases or de-, where there will sometimes be a space between the title and name). The titles used in English are all male titles(like son), but there are also female ones used in Irish like Ní/Nic, but I have never seen them used in English. There are a lot more different titles used in Irish that you never see in the anglicised names. Some Irish names in English have even dropped the title! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name
You can probably find similar oddities in the other Celtic languages (Especially Scottish Gaelic, I believe most of what I stated here should apply to it too!).
BONUSES: As far as I know in Dutch the is considered 1 letter, and so if it is at the start of a word that needs capitalisation, both letters will be capitalised! (Like in the word IJsselmeer)
There are also the cases used in programming, like camelCase or snake_case, which seem odd until you realise you can't name stuff with a space! They also help standardise code to an extent.
I love the etymology of uppercase and lowercase!
I really enjoyed Patreon's video.
I'm not sure about Japanese or other languages that use characters, but in Chinese languages, a caracter can be emphasized by making it bigger (hard to explain if you're not seeing it), and my MS Word (Taiwan version) has an opinion to circle a character to emphasize it. I haven't tried it, though, because I don't need to type Chinese on my computer.
In Russian capitalization rules are similar but you don't use them quite as often as in English. If it's a name of a country, it's capitalized, but if it's an adjective, no matter if it means an English man, or the English language, no capitalization, it's just english. Same with time names, monday, january, etc. Because if you use capitalization, it means you mean to do it, if you write January with a capital, it can mean you refer maybe to some company of the same name, or a document, rules are not strict on that, but that's definitely a use for it
Thanks for making this neat video! I’m a little surprised that you didn’t get into initialisms like FBI, CIA, USA, UK, etc. When did that become a linguistic thing? And what’s up with small caps, is that just a font thing, or is there more to it?
Also, this falls outside your wheelhouse, but I think it would be neat to compare the usage of hiragana and katakana in Japanese with the use of uppercase and lowercase letters in alphabetic languages. English sometimes uses all caps for loud onomatopoeia, kind of like the Japanese use of katakana. And I think it would be neat if English used all caps on all words of foreign origin.
Katakana is also often used for emphasis similar to how capital letters can be used to draw attention. I often see it in videogames, where personal pronouns like "ore" sometimes go in katakana, like to signify a character is putting emphasis on it because he's manly (ore being a manly personal pronoun).
Yes he didn’t mention acronyms.
In Dutch, capital letters and cities are called "hoofdletters" and "hoofdsteden" respectively, meaning: "head letters" and "head cities" respectively
In German, it's the same with Hauptstadt (can mean "main city", but originally (and still) means "head city"). The capitals are called "Großbuchstaben" (big letters...pretty straightforward name :D). However, the word "capitol" in English as well as "capital" both stem from Latin "caput" which also means head ^^.
In toki pona (my favourite conlang), capital letters are only used for names. This distinguishes names from other words. Names are also only adjectives, so they describe nouns.
For example, “Nathan” could be “jan Natan” (person Natan) and if a dog was named Nathan it would be “soweli Natan.” (animal Natan)
toki, pilin sina li seme? mi toki Toki Pona pona ^^
@@captainyulef5845 toki a. tenpo suli li kama li weka a. taso toki pona li awen lon mi!
I either heard or merely assumed that upper and lower cases were so named because the uppercase letters appear on top on a typewriter key.
Working with a foundation in Thailand (a country that doesn't have capital letters in their language-which is good considering there are 44 consonants) that does international puppet festivals, I have to remind them again and again that titles, names, and countries need to be capitalised, and that you don't simply capitalise some words and not others just for the fun of it. I seriously think they do it on purpose just to make me crazier.
Could you do a video on text figures (the fonts where the J is below the line, the 1 is like an I, etc)?
Oh, I've never been early to a NameExplain. I noticed that the stock Lord of the Rings image has the of the in all caps while he says it lacks capitals.
That’s because the title is in small caps. All the other words start with slightly larger uppercase letters, so they’re considered capitalized.
In Hebrew we have "print " and "write " letters. Where when you type you mostly use print (with write don't apeering on the keyboard, and need to be chosen as styles font) and in hand written text you are not expected to write in "print "
Japanese doesn't use the cases like English, but it does have two "cases" - Hiragana and Katakana, and they're pretty much the same with the Latin alphabets in the sense that they have rules to follow when deciding which to use
Well, sort of.
From what I know:
Hiragana - writing down sounds of regular Kanji above them for da bebes that don't know Kanji yet or as single syllable words that don't have their own Kanji
Katakana - Writing down pronunciation of proper nouns since the characters they use for names often don't follow any rules
My guess before I watch: Capital Letters used to be used for important words. Names are pretty important, so the capital was kept until now
Really like you videos PATRICK.
The emerging pattern I have noticed is that in social media, use of capital letters is optional, but in the workplace, the schoolish convention is to be followed. That may be because supervisors, managers, and so forth are older and the schoolish convention is what they learned.
It will be interesting to see whether the younger generation will grow into the schoolish convention or whether it will overturn it as they grow older.
In the same way that there is casual speech you would use with friends and close acquaintances that you would (or SHOULD) never use in formal or professional settings, there are similar patterns in written language. Both forms of language might evolve a bit over time, but I don't think it will, nor should it, fuse into a single "always informal" form that throws out pretty much all the grammar and spelling rules. After all, it's the very non-observation of the rules that lends the conversation a sense of informality. If both rule sets were identical, you would lose that distinction, which is a socially important part of language.
In drafting, writing is done in all capital letters to avoid ambiguity. Capital letters have more distinct shapes that aren't so easily misread when viewed upside down.
If you look at construction plans, there are rarely lower case letters. And many engineers and draftsmen train to write in only capital letters. It's to minimize confusion. Plans are crowded and shorthand and abbreviations are used all the time. Many characters all look the same when written and not using lower case just reduces the possibilities. I, l, and 1 is the best example of this.
11:18 gen Zer here the reason I don't use capitals is partially laziness and partially refusing to type properly (both hands on the keyboard with each finger typing out a few specific letters)
In Portuguese it’s pretty much like English. Except that in later reforms in the 20th century, we no longer capitalize months, weekdays, seasons and some other stuff.
Nowadays, grammars also recommend “Amazon river” and “saint John”, but I guess most people still capitalize River and Saint (I include myself here haha)
The rule now is not to capitalize titles, except for stylistic purposes, such as in covers or logos. So you might find “The Book Thief” like that on the cover a book, but if you read that page with the book info inside, or if you’re mentioning the book on a text, it’s gonna be “The book thief”, for example. Basically, our Title Case has been abandoned and we just use sentence case in titles as well. This is what grammars recommend nowadays, but people like to capitalize titles! So nevermind the grammar books 😆
In pharmacy, upper and lower cases are mixed in the same drug name to avoid confusion between similar names. This is called "tall man lettering" and would be used something like this:
HYDralazine hyDROXYzine
This may not be an *exact* use but it should get the idea across.
6:00 i was waiting for that, LOL.
will the end of capital letters lead to the end of capital punishment? if so i will rewrite this.
is it harder to understand this writing without capitals?
in my language people use capital letters in basically the same way, but the thing that's changing is that the names of proper place nouns are being Capitalized
as for gen z lower case thing, its just because we're lazy. but for texting, its really freaking weird. some people take time out of their day to change capitals to lowercase since autocorrect auto capitalizes your first letter, and most nouns.
I've thought about why younger people, including myself use fewer capitals. I think part of it might be that when sending text messages, it's often abundantly clear when a new utterance starts, because each message is already contained within its own bubble. This can also explain why the full stop is usually omitted, and even seen as implying a stern or threatening tone of voice. Compare the text messages
1) okay, fine
2) okay, fine.
Sometimes a capital will automatically be added at the start of a sentence, like when you have the settings to a word processing program a certain way, so you could just not remember the capital at the start of a sentence. Usually though, I still do it, and I think most young people do in most genres. I myself often don't capitalize proper nouns, and I think there might be more variation in that among the younger generation. It does take like one more keypress, but I don't think it's necessarily to save time. Maybe it's just because it's perceived as less necessary. To me whether something is a proper noun or not is just always clear from context, capitalisation or not, so why explicitly mark a piece of information that's already known? Idk though it'd be fun to find out more of the specifics, cause this is just my own speculation
Not true necessarily because many words can be totally different with or without a capital letter. Examples are Polish and polish. Or mark and Mark.
@@SWLinPHX Well yes, that's why I made the point of it being clear from context. If we're already talking about idk drawing and I say "I made a mark right on the middle of the paper" then it is clear from context that I mean something else than if I would have said "I came across Mark shopping for beans yesterday." This is exactly the same process that allows us to distinguish between "the bat was sleeping upside down" and "I picked up a bat that seemed sturdy enough" as having different meanings for the word 'bat,' and we don't need capitalisation for that, just context
Griffin Beaumont: sorry but I still don’t agree. If you text or use a computer or comments at all you know how easily things get misinterpreted in writing just because there’s no vocal inflection. It can be even worse. What if your sentence was “I picked up a bat I saw on the ground”. There are many instances where even context doesn’t tell the whole story unless the sentence before or after it explains it. There are so many ways to be misunderstood; at least capital letters just prevents a few of them.
@@SWLinPHX Maybe you're right to a certain extent. I would think the sentences before and after any given message *are* a part of the context of that message, which is usually enough to avoid misunderstanding. Of course you're right that misunderstandings still take place. It's just that in my personal experience those misunderstandings are not often about the meaning of homographs (regardless of whether capitals can make a difference). More often, vocal inflection is used to show the speaker's feelings and attitude towards the message, not necessarily to clear up homophones (though I agree it can help sometimes). Which is probably why emoticons and difference in spelling are often used to clear up that kind of thing ;p
Why I only wrote in lower case is because it's a hazzle to press the shift button while I try to hurry and catch up with sms text, chat or when I had to erase and rewrite something a hundred a times.
whatAboutCamelCase? Or any other typing convention in IT? Like variables need unique "single word" name and capital letters are used there commonly to make multiWord names possible
I write almost exclusively in minuscule (lowercase) letters bcos I find majuscule (uppercase) letters too aggressive, it’s for aesthetic, stylistic reasons, I’m also gen Z (-gen z? 🤔) but didn’t realize this was a thing
Programmers use capitals in an interesting way. You'll often see names of functions and variables written in Camel Case. This is because they can't have spaces in them but need unique names. Some examples: FunctionThatTakes2Parameters, VariableString, ExceptionNoFileFound. There's another school of thought on the naming of in computer code, using an underscore instead - hence Function_That_Takes_2_Parameters. But this is largely a matter of personal style, although some programming langues expressly forbid the using of underscores in names. Oh, and I've noticed CamelCase is starting to leak out into the main stream, for example UA-cam!
In regular writing, I always write in all caps with letters that are normally upper case just a larger font of the letter. Lower case is reserved for maths problems.
A mix of capital and lower case letters are needed these days to create passwords that are more difficult to crack. That will change eventually with the growing use of biometrics.
🤣 sorry about your autocorrect!
(My problem is d&d terms over taking real words, swype legit thought i wanted "wis" instead of "words" just now.)
In indonesia when we write titles, we musn't use capital in words like these (i forgot what it's called) : the, of, and, etc.
In English as well. Prepositions and articles should be lowercase in titles unless they are the first or last word. You can do whatever you want, I guess, as the video seems to think, but if you wanna be right, you do it the standard way.
I like Captial Letters, they give a Text Stucture and a visual nice Appearence, I use them in the English Language normally just when it is to do, but my Mothertongue German has every noun written in that Style. I use them because I like the Appeance.
hmmm according to my introductory lecture in linguistics, grammar only concerns the morphology and syntax of a language, that is word formation and sentence construction. Capital letters are only important in writing, so they concern orthography.
Interestingly, minuscule and majuscule are the basic words in French. Also capitals are pretty much used the same way. Just small things luke not capitalizing months are different.
In Gaelic, some words have capitals at the second letter
Irish they wouldn't do that... 📉😎📈
oH is that right? i Like pOtatoes
Patreon Explains Names very well
CAPITAL LETTERS WILL NEVER DISAPPEAR BECAUSE SHOUTING WILL NEVER DISAPPEAR
I think that using mainly lowercase letters is more of a lazy thing than anything. Most of the text input has some sort of auto correct so even texting this message I don't need to hit shift for caps and I don't need to use the apostrophe because it is added auto like.
You didn't pick up the influence of Unix programming and file system naming being case sensitive so the convention is to prefer all lower case. So it is high tech to use lower case in prose too.
capitalis "head" -> the head (top bit) of the letter case; not the cases you display but the case with the small cubby holes. Capitalization is language-specific. Title case in German or Dutch is different to that in English
I kid you not, I was wondering just this question and then this video was published and showed up in my subscription feed.
Coincidence? I think not!
Capitalization rules in Spanish are interesting. We only use capital letters for proper nouns, the beginning of a sentence, the beginning of a title, or certain titles. We don't capitalize people groups, languages, days of the week, months, or titles unless it's the first word in a title (or a proper noun).
It's quite simple: capital letters stand out in the sentence. They tell you when the sentence beings. They are also applied to proper nouns, which are often the most important part of a sentence. Thus they convey information. I am going to the city. I am going to Paris. Paris stands out, giving you specific information at a glance.
Can you do Are There Any Pavelićs Left?
In spanish capital letters are only used for proper nouns and at the start of sentences, I can't think of other situations in which they are used...
In my mother tongue Punjabi we don't have uppercase letters. Script is called Gurmukhi. I always find Learning English a bit weird but over time it has grown normal for me. This video reminded me of old times.
I was explained that the "all caps" as "yelling" came from text to talk programs increasing the volume of the phrase written in all caps
Why do old Latin names use the V instead of the U? as in THE FORVM
Because it ment U in latin.
I think in Georgian they doesn’t use capital letter in modern day, but when they do want to “capitalize” a letter, they use a letter from a previous script that’s not the current script.