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.

[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.)