Now you’ve watched this video here’s a question for you. How many capitals would the sentence “the man with no eyes is called steve” have in sentence case, title case (with and without including minor words), all caps case, and in Old English? ANSWERS BELOW! Sentence case: 2 Title Case (including minor words): 8 Title case (not including minor words): 6 All caps: 29 Old English: 4 (the nouns of man, eyes, and Steve plus the at the start) PS These answers may be wrong. I had the idea to do this a minute before the video went live lol
In Hebrew, we don't have capital letters but we do have 2 different writing styles K'tav (meaning hand write) & D'fus (meaning print) i let you guess when we use which
Wouldn't Old English be 0? I don't believe the runes had a lowercase/uppercase distinction... Even when scribes adapted the latin script, I don't believe they had any consistent rules. Wikipedia, the infallable source of all human knowledge that can't possibly be wrong (\s), seems to agree. Note that the time of the printing press is early modern English, not Old English. From: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalization_in_English "Old English did not have a distinction between uppercase and lowercase, and at best had embossed or decorated letters indicating sections. Middle English capitalization in manuscripts remained haphazard, and was often done for visual aesthetics more than grammar; in poetry, the first letter of each line of verse is often capitalized. With the development of the printing press in Europe and England capitalization of initial letters and proper nouns became more regularized, perhaps partly to distinguish new sentences in a time where punctuation remained sparse and irregularly used. The plays of Shakespeare show capitalization both of new lines and sentences, proper nouns, and some significant common nouns and verbs."
@@YoniIsrael It is fairly rare for writing systems to differ in their handwritten and printed forms. But for systems decended from the Phoenician Abjad (from which the Hebrew, Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arab systems decended) it's more the norm than not. Arabic is the only one that I can think of, where the printed form emulates the handwritten form. Think all the different handwriting styles for the Latin (and Greek and Cyrillic) alphabets: Cursive, block lettering, black lettering, "standard" handwritten, etc. For print there's book style, monospaced, sans-serif, etc.
@@qwertyTRiG Language doesn't always follow logic, but based on those capitalisation rules how wrong it seems to me to write this down or say it... what about: "The Amazon River and Mississippi River rivers."?
my language is german so all nouns are capitalized. Also when adressing someone in the politeform "Sie" or "Ihr" are capitalized, as was the informal "Du" once, but that is slowly faded
That’s why I find German so much easier to learn than English (even though I’m a native English speaker). German is consistent across the board, if it’s a noun, it’s be capitalized (and if it’s a common noun it can be made into a monstrous word, like „Rechtschultzversicherrungsgesellschaften”)
Since we're on the subject of diminishing capitalization, I'm curious what not capitalizing a noun in German comes across as. Like you said, I know it's the proper thing to do, but I'd guess people don't do it 100% of the time, either mistakes or lazy or whatever, so just curious what the perception might be.
@@GarceusLegend Well, I personally, speaking for myself, always take care to capitalize nouns, cause it really looks weird and out of place if you don't do it...well, except for everyday language like text messages online or with friends. There, it is pretty common that everything's written without capital letters, cause it's easier and faster. In some cases, however, there are words that are written without capitals by many although they should be. E.g. the nominalized verbs like "the walking" = "das Gehen" are often written without the capital letter, although it should be. Also, there are some cases where it's not even clear if it should be written capitalized or not. With regular nouns it clearly looks out of place to not capitalize them, but in some cases, there is some confusion.
@@Gandalf-fe3gw German as well. in some cases, the capitalization of nouns is an important distinguishing feature. I.e. "Sie ist gut zu Vögeln." vs. "Sie ist gut zu vögeln." For non-German speakers: "She is nice to birds." vs. "She is nice to f*ck." It's an extreme example but illustrates the necessity perfectly.
Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, and Armenian script : use letter-case Hanzi, Kanji, Kana, Hangul, Arabic script, Devanagari, and any other Asian writing system : *we don't do that here.*
Modern Greek has upper and lower case, and I think this started with Medieval Greek: Νυνι δε μένει πιστις, ελπίς, αγάπη, τα τρία ταύτα, μείζον δε τούτων η αγάπη. - I Corinthians 13:13
Not exactly accurate. The minuscule letters were used more often, meaning printers needed more of them, so the case was larger and heavier, therefore it was easier to place at a lower shelf height. Where the majuscule letters could be placed on a higher shelf without too much strain. Both cases (the boxes) were constantly being used, roughly equal.
So the ad I got on this video was “Do you know where the capital “A” in Chick-fil-A comes from?” And I was shook. Name Explain content even extends to the ads
2:27, Remember, these rules are specific to English. For example, in German „Meine Katze heißt Larry“, you will notice that the word for cat, „Katze“, is capitalized, even though it’s a common noun.
I speak Spanish as a second language, and I've noticed that Spanish still capitalizes most proper nouns, like English, but certain proper nouns, like language names and demonyms, don't get capitalized. For example, England would be written "Inglaterra" in Spanish, but English is just "inglés".
At an ISP I worked years ago, we had the habit of pronouncing capital letters-for example, when reading out a password-in a louder, higher-pitched voice. =D
I used to work in linguistics publications back in the days of IBM Selectric typewriters. During a proofreading session, one of us would read from the original copy and pronounce acronyms with a lower voice, italics with a higher voice, and italicized acronyms in a "low falsetto." It sped up the process as long as we didn't crack up too much.
I find it interesting, that in English you also capitalise some adjectives, like "English". As you said, we use majuscules for all nouns in German. And i think, that's good, because there's a lot difference between these two sentences: "Ich habe in Russland liebe Genossen" (I have nice comrades in Russia) and "Ich habe in Russland Liebe genossen" (I have enjoyed love in Russia) ;)
You should do a video about the history of cursive writing and whether it should be continued in school, although I guess that wouldn’t really be a name explain.
Roman numerals are capital numbers. One, because the Romans used them first, like capital letters, then came lower case letters and arabic numerals. And two, well just look at them. I,V, X, C, D, M. They're capital numbers.
You use them all the time. If you were writing something in all caps and included numerals, you would use lining numbers so they don't stick out, making these essentially "uppercase numbers". You also use lining numbers in tabular data when numbers are just used by themselves. However, in regular text, you use old-style numbers, in a sense "lowercase numbers" to blend in with the ascenders and descenders and variation between capital and lowercase letter heights, etc.
@@leewaters5949 Never know that these two numeral sets had names. I always thought they just were stylistic choices of different fonts. Thank you the new info.
The numbers we use (type) are all capital. But lowercase numbers do exist, they are called Oldstyle Figures, and they are not part of ASCII - you need to use a special font to render them.
Lower and upper cases help with clarity, specially when quick reading is needed. Upper cases are easier to read and give emphasis. I hope they don't go away because they're important in maps and highway signs. If you read: INTERSTATE 405 SOUTH, it clearly stands out and can read it easy while either driving 60 MPH or while dodging traffic. And if you read: Wilshire Blvd WEST, it makes it clear that it's the road you're going to and the direction you'll be taking. Maybe not the best explanation but just look at how highway signs are written next time you're on the road.
Working with a foundation in Thailand (a country that doesn't have capital letters in their language-which is good considering there are 44 consonants) that does international puppet festivals, I have to remind them again and again that titles, names, and countries need to be capitalised, and that you don't simply capitalise some words and not others just for the fun of it. I seriously think they do it on purpose just to make me crazier.
There is another, more recent non-standard use of capital letters called CammelCase. This is where you capitalize the first letter of component words in a compound word. One of the primary places it is used is for variable or function names in computer programs. There are two main driving forces here. One is that the syntax rules of the language usually requires a name to be a single "word" with no spaces. The other is that you need a different name for each one, and you want to use a descriptive name to understand what the role and purpose of a variable is. Or you use it to illustrate the relationship between different entities. So you might give them names like CurrentCount, StartingCount, EndingCount. There are lots of different variations of CammelCase, and the spread of computer literacy into general society is causing it to be used outside of its original context.
In toki pona (my favourite conlang), capital letters are only used for names. This distinguishes names from other words. Names are also only adjectives, so they describe nouns. For example, “Nathan” could be “jan Natan” (person Natan) and if a dog was named Nathan it would be “soweli Natan.” (animal Natan)
Pretty sure it's because of phones making capital letters (and apostrophes) a hassle. I like to think I type properly while using a pc as I am now, but I type like a toddler on a phone; no capitalization, and only periods and commas for punctuation.
Japanese doesn't use the cases like English, but it does have two "cases" - Hiragana and Katakana, and they're pretty much the same with the Latin alphabets in the sense that they have rules to follow when deciding which to use Well, sort of.
From what I know: Hiragana - writing down sounds of regular Kanji above them for da bebes that don't know Kanji yet or as single syllable words that don't have their own Kanji Katakana - Writing down pronunciation of proper nouns since the characters they use for names often don't follow any rules
Some words in Irish have initial consonant mutations, depending on the word. The initial mutation is never capitalised, even if it is on the start of a word that starts with a capital; so you get words starting with lower case letters, followed by a capital letter. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_initial_mutations For Example: Gallimh - Galway i nGallimh - in Galway Anglicised Irish second names also have odd capitalisation, your Mc/Mac- and O'- names are all titles, so they are capitalised, along with the family name. In Irish, there is a space between the title and the family name/clan name (A similar thing can be seen in the Norman tiles used in Ireland, like Fitz- , where the name part will be capitalised in some cases or de-, where there will sometimes be a space between the title and name). The titles used in English are all male titles(like son), but there are also female ones used in Irish like Ní/Nic, but I have never seen them used in English. There are a lot more different titles used in Irish that you never see in the anglicised names. Some Irish names in English have even dropped the title! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_name You can probably find similar oddities in the other Celtic languages (Especially Scottish Gaelic, I believe most of what I stated here should apply to it too!). BONUSES: As far as I know in Dutch the is considered 1 letter, and so if it is at the start of a word that needs capitalisation, both letters will be capitalised! (Like in the word IJsselmeer) There are also the cases used in programming, like camelCase or snake_case, which seem odd until you realise you can't name stuff with a space! They also help standardise code to an extent.
I like Captial Letters, they give a Text Stucture and a visual nice Appearence, I use them in the English Language normally just when it is to do, but my Mothertongue German has every noun written in that Style. I use them because I like the Appeance.
In Russian capitalization rules are similar but you don't use them quite as often as in English. If it's a name of a country, it's capitalized, but if it's an adjective, no matter if it means an English man, or the English language, no capitalization, it's just english. Same with time names, monday, january, etc. Because if you use capitalization, it means you mean to do it, if you write January with a capital, it can mean you refer maybe to some company of the same name, or a document, rules are not strict on that, but that's definitely a use for it
in my language people use capital letters in basically the same way, but the thing that's changing is that the names of proper place nouns are being Capitalized
as for gen z lower case thing, its just because we're lazy. but for texting, its really freaking weird. some people take time out of their day to change capitals to lowercase since autocorrect auto capitalizes your first letter, and most nouns.
I think in Georgian they doesn’t use capital letter in modern day, but when they do want to “capitalize” a letter, they use a letter from a previous script that’s not the current script.
Capitalization rules in Spanish are interesting. We only use capital letters for proper nouns, the beginning of a sentence, the beginning of a title, or certain titles. We don't capitalize people groups, languages, days of the week, months, or titles unless it's the first word in a title (or a proper noun).
It's quite simple: capital letters stand out in the sentence. They tell you when the sentence beings. They are also applied to proper nouns, which are often the most important part of a sentence. Thus they convey information. I am going to the city. I am going to Paris. Paris stands out, giving you specific information at a glance.
Lehrer: "Warum hast du denn das Wort ,Löwe' klein geschrieben? Ich habe doch erklärt, dass man alles groß schreibt, was man anfassen kann!" Schüler: "Na, dann versuchen Sie mal, einen Löwen anzufassen...!"
This is one of the fun things about Hebrew being a zombie language. It was effectively "frozen" for roundabouts 1500 years, so it never developed past the block-type alphabet. In modern times, with the language's revival in an era when people who are not calligraphers need to write in Hebrew, a script alphabet was developed for handwriting, but the two alphabets are entirely exclusive. I don't think there is any context, aside from possibly a *particularly* stylistic brand logo, where you'd see both script and block letters side-by-side. Hebrew didn't have those centuries of people writing letters faster and faster, slowly adding curves and shapes to make the letters easier to write. It just happened all at once. I wonder how Hebrew writing would be different if we'd had an active, live Hebrew-speaking population that was writing for all those centuries of diaspora.
Thanks for making this neat video! I’m a little surprised that you didn’t get into initialisms like FBI, CIA, USA, UK, etc. When did that become a linguistic thing? And what’s up with small caps, is that just a font thing, or is there more to it? Also, this falls outside your wheelhouse, but I think it would be neat to compare the usage of hiragana and katakana in Japanese with the use of uppercase and lowercase letters in alphabetic languages. English sometimes uses all caps for loud onomatopoeia, kind of like the Japanese use of katakana. And I think it would be neat if English used all caps on all words of foreign origin.
Katakana is also often used for emphasis similar to how capital letters can be used to draw attention. I often see it in videogames, where personal pronouns like "ore" sometimes go in katakana, like to signify a character is putting emphasis on it because he's manly (ore being a manly personal pronoun).
hmmm according to my introductory lecture in linguistics, grammar only concerns the morphology and syntax of a language, that is word formation and sentence construction. Capital letters are only important in writing, so they concern orthography.
In Hebrew we have "print " and "write " letters. Where when you type you mostly use print (with write don't apeering on the keyboard, and need to be chosen as styles font) and in hand written text you are not expected to write in "print "
Oh, I've never been early to a NameExplain. I noticed that the stock Lord of the Rings image has the of the in all caps while he says it lacks capitals.
capitalis "head" -> the head (top bit) of the letter case; not the cases you display but the case with the small cubby holes. Capitalization is language-specific. Title case in German or Dutch is different to that in English
In Dutch we use the capitals for names and such, but also for words that are important like God for the only one God, or Christ mostly also to separate them from others. Like gods, god as a daity. A typical Dutch letter is the IJ, or in lower case ij in upper case is always written as IJ as in the IJssel, the Dutch name for the river.
In some Catholic prayers, the first words are all in capital letters, I think it is to highlight the starting example: LAVABO inter innocentes manus meal et circundabo altars tuum Domine(…)
I NORMALLY LIKE TO CALL THOSE LETTERS "NORMAL LETTERS" BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE LETTERS THAT WERE MADE SPECIFICALLY TO BE READ AS EASY AS POSSIBLE and i like to call those secondary letters because they are mainly made just to save space on the paper THIS IS THE REASON ALMOST NO-ONE WIRES APOSTROPHES WHEN WRITING IN NORMAL LETTERS IT IS BECAUSE YOU DO NOT NEED TO SAVE SPACE IF YOU WERE TO WRITE WITH THEM WHILE IF YOU ARE USING SECONDARY LETTERS YOU WANT TO CONSERVE SPACE WHICH IS THE REASON OF MAKING MOST OF THE SHORTENED WORDS
In French, a lot of what are considered proper nouns in English aren't considered so in French. For example months would be capitalised in English aren't in French eg January/janvier. The same is true for days of the week as well. Titles (as it a person's titles, not titles of a for example book) aren't capitalised either. So in English you would say "Professor Armstrong" in French it would be "professeur Armstrong". Nationalities and religions are the same aswell. In titles (titles of a book this time) the first word (or 2 words if the first word is an article) are capitalised, any other word must have "the same weight" as the first word. So your channel name in French would be "Nom Expliquer"
Phrases used as variable names in programming languages often written in camel case and/or pascal case. Future English may adopt that. i.e. thisIsASentenceWrittenInCamelCase.
As far as I remember (it's been a while) Portuguese and Spanish follow the same capitalization rules as English but not for proper nouns like Wednesday and October for example, I could be wrong though. In Japanese there isn't capitalization since it's a different alphabet (I don't think that's the right word), AND they don't have space between words either.
The disappearance of capital letters started with the internet being used by young people really. I myself used to never capitalize anything when I was a teenager in the late 90's and early 2000's because it requires you to push the shift key down at the same time as the letter key and that takes time. So it basically started because we were lazy kids who didn't see a point in it if the word was still legible. As I grew up I got out of that habit for the most part, but it still happens when I'm in the middle of a back and forth conversation with someone over private messages on Facebook.
Also, in German all nouns are capitalized, and in older English it seems almost arbitrary what words get capitalized (in addition to beginnings of sentences and proper nouns).
@@horatiumlour system of naming in Arabic is very weird for example my name is Bader Subait Mubarak Khamis Najim Rabii Musalam Salim Jumah Al Habib Alaraimi
whatAboutCamelCase? Or any other typing convention in IT? Like variables need unique "single word" name and capital letters are used there commonly to make multiWord names possible
In his essay, "The Awful German Language", Mark Twain noted the custom of capitalizing all nouns made him doubt a news story about a tiger that escaped from a zoo had eaten the unfortunate fir tree until he realized that Tannenbaum was a person's name.
The Portuguese language is quite more economic with capital letters than English. We use it in the start of sentences, with proper nouns, with acronyms and all capitals when we want to put emphasis in a word or make it look like it's being yelled. We even have rules for upper and lowercase letters in acronyms. All 2-3 letters acronyms are written in lowercase. However, the 4+ letter ones will be written in all capitals only if the letters are pronounced individually, as in ESPN. If they're pronounced like a word, it's written like a proper noun, so NASA, POTUS and SWAT, in Portuguese, would be written Nasa, Potus and Swat.
I think it's a variation of the rule that you don't have to capitalise trivial words like "of" and "the", just being imported from Italian, rather than being native English.
In English as well. Prepositions and articles should be lowercase in titles unless they are the first or last word. You can do whatever you want, I guess, as the video seems to think, but if you wanna be right, you do it the standard way.
Makes me want to set my Patreon name to "do not yell my name." Anyhow, the way the Japanese mix Kanji, Hiragana and Katagana is not completely alien compared to how Latin Alphabet languages use the majuscule and minuscule. At least in my opinion. Question: The capital also refers to the top decoration of columns in Roman architecture, and the slab sitting on top of that usually had some writing on it. Is there a linkage with capital letters and column capitals as well?
1948 Danish language reform? How does that work? Did the government decide to simply change the grammar and passed a law? Sounds interesting, maybe topic for another video...
I have always thought English uses far too much capital letters. As a foreign language native speaker, when you are studying English, it feels so weird the insane amount of things you need to capitalize: Months, days of the week, languages, demonyms, every word inside a title, first word inside a parenthesis, titles for people, every astronomical object and even a pronoun. For a native Spanish speaker it doesn´t have any sense at all.
🐪 youMissedCamelCaseWhichIsHelpfulInNamingComputerProgrammingVariablesBecauseYouCannotUseSpaces 1. I'm sure there has to be a misspelling in there somewhere... 2. That would be an obnoxiously long name for a variable 3. It's also helpful with URLs 4. According to Wikipedia article on camel case iPhone is considered camel casing
2:16 But what about these exceptions: Letters that are more commonly only in lowercase (e.g. eszett _ß_ in German) Letters that have different variations (e.g. long s _ſ_ in Old English being lowercase-exclusive) Letters that are neither/caseless (e.g. ʻokina _ʻ_ in Hawaiian)
the reason people write in all lower-case is because it takes less effort than capitalizing the right letters when you're typing on your phone or computer. when you write it out by hand it takes the same amount of effort.
Technically, the Lord of the Rings cover was all in upper case. There is however the typographical convention of mixing capital letters and small caps (as they are called) as one would mix capitals and lowercase.
Same, I have no clue what he was talking about at that part. Nobody in Gen Z I've ever met has ever mentioned anything about not liking capital letters.
