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As a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called "i-
by thomasfedb 8y ago
As a writer I will jump through linguistic hoops to move uncapitalised proper names away from the start of a sentence - for example, a medical device called "i-gel" which I wrote a paper on. Starting a sentence without a capital is just too jarring in formal writing I find.
- tonyarkles 8y agoYeah, doing a MSc in CS that references a bunch of companies and open source projects... there was definitely some mangling needed to keep the uncapitalized proper nouns away from the start of sentences.
- adrianratnapala 8y agoYep. For hundreds of years English has had a rule that proper nouns are capitalised; it is pretentious to imagine that "myThingy is soooo cool that you can't even use the rules of English on it." Now in some fields, like computer documentation, there's practical reason to change. It would be confusing to capitalise command-names if they are lower-case in their (case sensitive) native language. But newspapers aren't bound by that consideration, and it doesn't really apply to company names anyway.
- FearNotDaniel 8y agoActually, look in any book printed 18th/early 19th century and you'll see that the rules were quite different then: all nouns were capitalised, as in modern German, and the 'long s' was frequently used in the middle of words. Mass literacy, almost-universal schooling along with physical punishments for children not doing exactly what the textbook said have given us moderns the idea that the 'proper' English of our grandparents remained the same for centuries, but really the language has always been in flux and the rate of change just got significantly slowed by cultural pressures between approximately 1850s to 1950s.
- thomasfedb 8y agoI don't think of myself as a total sheep - case in point I put the comma outside of the quotation mark because otherwise it parses weird.
- hnal943 8y agoYou are fighting the good fight.
- adrianratnapala 8y ago> all nouns were capitalised But that is still a rule that all proper nouns are capitalised. It's also beside the point. No one is claiming that rules don't change, or even that they are sharply defined. I was claiming that it is presumptuous complain about other people when they follow the traditional rules.
- thomasfedb 8y agoEven then, I don't think anybody would be outraged if I wrote 'Rsync' or 'Grep'.