Then you have the Welsh language and its consonant mutations (the first letter of some words change when the word follows certain other words).

Cymru = Wales
Dw i'n dod o Gymru = I come from Wales
Dw i'n byw yng Nghymru = I live in Wales
Lloegr a Chymru = England and Wales

Oh, and "w" is a vowel. Fun language.

I had a long post talking about capitlization, but we can disagree with each other. Though I'd argue that you can arbitrarily chang ethe rules of capitalization without chanigng the meaning of a written sentence and this is a strong indicator that capitalization has little inherent value in modern written English (it had more significant importance historically than today particularly for people who primarily literate in Latin and trying to create a literate vernacular; this is conflict is the source of many stupid grammar rules).

But that is all way beside the point.

The letter forms in Arabic convey information, just not information we think is important. What is the distinction between saying that it is worth noting that a letter is the first in a sentence and that it is the first in a word? Or the last. Particularly in pre-printed languages it can be very useful to have a visual indicator that a word is ending and a new one is beginning to differentiate unconnected letters within a word from unconnected letters caused by word breaks.

And in that episode of Star Trek the problem wasn't that he somehow verbally dropped a capital letter (which isn't possible) but that he mispronounced the name altogether (short first a instead of long) and implying a refusal to think of Data as a person. But if he'd pronounced it the same way as the character there'd be no way to know if he was capitalizing it in his head.

Talk about topic drift...
 

In Terry Pratchett books, Death SPEAKS IN ALL CAPITALS (typeset as small caps.). He's not yelling (he is actually quite soft spoken), it's just the way he talks.

This thread is one of the reasons I love us.

From fake countdowns to Star Trek. Awesome.

I'm lost. There are no Arab's in Star Trek!

Yes, I know. But it was the handiest pop reference I could think of as to the importance of knowing whether something is a proper name or merely a word. Capitalization provides the answer.

I don't know how vital that is to the world economy. But it's a rather important part of written communication.

So we have a complicated rule to account for the 1 in 100,000 times that a proper noun isn't obvious from context? Sounds generally unnecessary to me.

(Obviously, we disagree, but I'm sure we can keep going back an forth for another couple pages at least.)

Well, it certainly stretched out a pointless countdown thread that would have likely would have otherwise died before the counter reached zero.