If you are sitting next to someone on public transportation who irritates you...

[Alex]

Why do you need a capital letter to denote the start of a sentence when you have a piece of punctuation doing the same thing right before it? And "Hey Steve, how was your day?" doesn't really contain any more information than "hey steve, how was your day?"

I don't know if there is any logical origin for why it is the way it is. I'd assume it is because it started out purely as a written cursive language and some letter combination flow together differently than others for ease of writing and over the centuries it became institutionalized (that's a wild-assed guess, though). And some of the letter pairs do have distortions of sound from how the letters are pronounced individually (but I don't recall if this is true in all cases). Such ligatures are common in many writing systems (Korean has them for all of its vowel combinations, I believe) and have equivelants in English and other Latin-based writing systems. It would be easy to imagine English having a situation where "h" and "t" combine to a new looking form when an "h" follows a "t." And as a very faint vestigial we can see such a thing when an "e" follows an "a" at the beginning of a word, such as in "Mt. Ætna." In German, if you find yourself needing to write two consecutive s'es then you don't write "ss" but rather "ß" and until about 250 years ago in English the same thing happened where that "ss" was instead written as a very tall single s that a lot of people see now and think is some weird "f" without the crossbar. As with the unnecessary short vowels in Arabic, the invention of typesetting and then later the limited real estate of typewriter keys pushed many of these oddities out of the mainstream and possibly out of the language (the cent sign is almost extinct in general usage because the earliest computer keyboards didn't have room for it).

But all languages (spoken and written) have elements that seem completely stupid and useless to people who don't use them natively. For example why does English have fewer letters than phonemes, requiring us to assign multiple phonemes to the same letter? Why does Japanese not allow (except in very rare cases) consecutive consonants but Czech allows several consecutives? Why are German nouns gendered essentially randomly but Russian nouns are gendered using very explicit rules? Why does Japanese have three different writing systems, which may be used all within a single sentence? How do so many languages get along without an equivelant of "a" and "the" while others can't go more than three words without using one of them? Why does the Russian alphabet, otherwise phonetic, contain two letters that don't actually represent specific phonemes?

Languages are quirky. That's what makes them interesting. If we were to plan them out we'd all speak the same one and there'd be five rules.

I remember a fellow linguistics student in my wife's program (from some south African country) who thought Western punctuation was the most retarded thing in the world since it essentially treats the reader (in his view) like an idiot that can't read unless every little nuance is provided explicitly (punctuation is much less necessary in fully inflected languages since they essentially self diagram).


Wow. Super-duper long winded. Just goes to show how boring Babel is since I wrote most of this while watching it.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

Why do you need a capital letter to denote the start of a sentence when you have a piece of punctuation doing the same thing right before it? And "Hey Steve, how was your day?" doesn't really contain any more information than "hey steve, how was your day?"

You need a capital letter to indicate the start of something new. A period indicates an end. A capital letter indicates a start. They are mostly used in conjunction with one another, but not always. A capital letter follows a colon, but a lowercase letter follows a semi-colon. That's (generally speaking) because the idea following a colon is new, and the idea following a semi-colon is a continuation.

Thus the start indication of a capital letter is unique, and may or may not properly follow from the particular end point of the previous statement.


The usefulness of capital letters to denote names is self-explanatory. steve is NOT the same as Steve. See the famous Star Trek episode where the replacment doctor insisted on calling the android "data" rather than "Data." It's important to indicate proper names as such.





I'm not contending the quirks of other written languages aren't interesting, merely that the quirks resulting from visual writing styles do not communicate any information in and of themselves. That is not true of English, where the differences in upper and lowercase characters do indeed communicate very particular information.

[Alex]

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.

[innerSpaceman]

Originally Posted by Alex Stroup

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.

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.

[Alex]

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.)