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

[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.