The typographer Jan Tschichold experimented with this in the thirties, though I think he recommended space-period-space to separate sentences rather than period-space-capital, and not bothering with a period at the end of a paragraph.
Double spacing in HTML doesn't sound a whole lot easier either. You'd either have to write something that changes one of the spaces to or do it by hand...
It's possible, but the meaning is slightly different. In "...my uncle, Jack, off..." you're clarifying that "Jack" is your uncle. In "...my uncle Jack off" you use "uncle" as a title. In the first example you could replace "Jack" by "Mr. Sparrow" or "that fellow over there", which you can't do in the second example.
I don't think you can use a word like "obsolete" in this context. There hasn't been any dramatic upset or change in usage - capitalisation is as useful, or not, as it ever was.
It may indeed be useless, but that's another question. Many (most?) other languages have no concept of capital letters; personally, I like it in English - it does convey meaning and enhances readability, IMO.
I like capitals. But I think like many, I don't use them in certain contexts - IM, for example, which is highly informal and, more importantly, every sentence is on a new line. This is why full stops can be dropped there too, and it doesn't look weird or hard to read. But in continuous prose, like here - I would argue they are useful. The post, for example, is just that little bit harder to read for his lack of capitalisation.
The cost is not too high. Compared to glyph-based languages, English is remarkably efficient in terms of character space, so it's not like we'd benefit all that much from a reduced character set. It might indeed help in typing emails but .. I've never really considered that so much of a burden? The proper solution isn't to ditch the capitals, it's to finally perfect continuous speech dictation...
update: isn't the author really proposing that formal speech itself is obsolete?
"I think like many, I don't use them in certain contexts - IM, for example, which is highly informal and, more importantly, every sentence is on a new line."
I used to do/think like that, too. But now that I've been touchtyping for a while I find the cost of hitting that shift key is really close to zero so I don't bother not capitalizing properly everywhere, IM included.
To everyone in this community who still isn't touchtyping: You're missing out. You're missing out!
Oh, I touchtype, or close enough anyway. Typing capitals has little or no cost. But to capitalise on IM, and to use fullstops, now seems overly formal to me, inappropriate in casual conversation with friends.
It's quite fascinating, really, how these things develop. For example:
friend: seen reddit today?
me: no # <-- devoid of further meaning, a neutral tone
me: No. # <-- overbearing and formal, almost a put-down:
"No, of course not. Stop wasting my time."
Language, and its contextual use, evolves rapidly and I would now argue that capitalisation and full stops in IM have taken on a different meaning than when used in regular prose.
It was substantially more difficult to read than it would have been had it been properly capitalized. I am now convinced that capitalization is not obsolete.
Don't forget that the whole purpose of writing is having it read. Anything that makes the reading easier without sacrificing accuracy is good. Capitalization, correct spelling, and to a lesser extent punctuation are foundations of good writing, because they improve readability and comprehension.
As a matter of information theory, whatever feature a writing system has tends to disambiguate sentences that would be ambiguous without that feature being marked. The late John DeFrancis had an excellent article in the first issue of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association called "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese," in which he mentioned many issues of readability that differ between Chinese and English because of the different orthographies of the standard written forms of the two languages. Capitalization is useful in English, and it is habitual to me as a former editor of trade magazines and a law review. Other languages have no such thing as capitalization in the writing system, but they have some arbitrary feature or another that also conveys information to experienced readers of the language. Capitalization is NOT obsolete in English.
(a) I think you mean "fewer and fewer examples"; saying "less and less" makes you sound like an idiot.
(b) The latter part of (a) may only apply when read by educated people, but since they're the people that make all the decisions, you should probably keep following proper grammatical syntax for now.
(c) This is basically like telling, say, Arabic linguists that reading right to left is "obsolete"; it's a language construct, it can't just magically become obsolete.
I suppose you could argue that capitalization is a formality, but then you'd have to make an argument against all formal speech. The biggest hurdle you'd have is convincing everyone that talking and writing in "txt speak" is acceptable. There are a lot of people, myself included, who would sooner die than see that day.
When I first saw the title of the post, I thought it was going to be about financial capitalization, but alas, some capital is still a requirement for business.
Incidentally, I think most people wouldn't take you seriously without the might of the shift key after every sentence ending period.
> Incidentally, I think most people wouldn't take you seriously without the might of the shift key after every sentence ending period.
And rightly so. Somebody who doesn't take any effort whatsoever to convey their message clearly shouldn't be taken seriously. Their reasoning and thinking is likely to be as sloppy as their writing.
Something illustrated quite well by the article :-)
From the title, I thought he was talking about the practice of determining the market capitalizations for publicly traded companies. I was actually interested until I read the post.
Don't forget acronyms, of which we have many. And capitals are an important visual cue to indicate the start of a new sentence.
On the self-submission question - I have no problem with it, if it's interesting, and this one is, if flawed. What I don't like is when people repeatedly submit their own blog posts here, every single one it seems like sometimes - I wish that could be programmatically blocked somehow.
