

Capitalization is obsolete - jmtame
http://jmtame.posterous.com/capitalization-is-obsolete

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dfreidin
I think it's easier to see the breaks between sentences with a capital letter
rather than relying solely on a small period.

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jmtame
but there's already white space after the period...

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lucumo
The same whitespace that's also after each word. That doesn't make it easier
to find at all.

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ZeroGravitas
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.

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tokenadult
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.

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tdavis
(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.

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lucumo
Capitalization is the difference between "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse"
and "i helped my uncle jack off a horse".

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sahaj
wouldn't you use a comma there?

"i helped my uncle, jack, off a horse."

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lucumo
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.

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sahaj
I helped my uncle that fellow over there off a horse.

you need a comma in the above sentence; it doesn't matter if you use
capitalization or not.

i helped my uncle, that fellow over there, off a horse.

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lucumo
That was my point, yes.

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sahaj
i'll give you a point for that?

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billswift
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.

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incomethax
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.

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lucumo
_> 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 :-)

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donaldc
That blog post was (in a way) persuasive...

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.

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mad44
I write a whole paragraph without capitalization, then invoke my emacs script
to automatically capitalize the paragraph. Problem solved.

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rms
Since this is only about making it easier for the writer, there are any number
of ways to have your writing auto-capitalized.

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jganetsk
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.

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Brushfire
Interesting. However, the blog fails to deal with the proper noun issue.

(Also, don't you think it's bad form to self submit your own short blog rants
here?)

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Alex3917
"Also, don't you think it's bad form to self submit your own short blog rants
here?"

It's explicitly not bad form as per the site guidelines.

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aneesh
As an interesting data point, many Asian languages don't have a concept of
capitalization in the language at all.

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sho
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?

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Hexstream
"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!

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sho
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.

