re From Typology to Type

[jbor]

on 19/5/02 12:56 AM, Otto at o.sell at telda.net wrote:

> So the main Study on M&D should be done by an Expert on 18th-style English.
> Is it known when (and maybe why) the English Language dropped the Habit of
> capitalizing Nouns?

It's actually not as fixed as you might think. David Crystal writes:

      A name is a word or phrase that identifies a specific person, place,
    or thing. We see the entity as an individual, and not as a member of a
    class: *Everest*, for example, is a unique name (a 'proper noun'),
    whereas *mountain* applies to a whole class of objects (a 'common
    noun'). In the written language, European languages generally recognise
    the distinction by writing names with an initial capital letter. But
    most other writing systems do not distinguish upper- and lower-case
    letters, and even in Europe there are several arbitrary conventions and
    points of uncertainty. English, for example, is idiosyncratic in its use
   of capitals for days of the week and proper adjectives (such as in *the
    Chinese language*). And decisions have to be made about whether one
    writes *catholic* or *Catholic*, *the church* or *the Church*, *bible*
    or *Bible*.
      The science that studies names is known as *onomastics* usually
    divided into the study of personal names (*anthroponomastics*) and place
    names (*toponomastics*). In more popular usage, however, the term
    *onomastics* is used for the former, and *toponymy* for the latter.
                            (_Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language_, 112)

There are differences between conventions in all European languages. Those
German Nouns (which is quite sensible, I agree), for example, and French
doesn't use capitals in the titles of books and movies in the same way that
English does.

But I think that in English the distinction between proper noun
(capitalised) and common noun (uncapitalised) is the rule which has
developed in order to standardise things. I think that if you look at
original English texts over the centuries you'll see a gradual progression
to the current state of usage, and maybe someone like Samuel Johnson or a
later dictionary-writer came up with this general rule. There are studies of
the topic, I'm sure:

http://www.sfs.nphil.uni-tuebingen.de/linguist/issues/6/6-389.html#1

I think in using capitals for some nouns and adjective-noun collocations in
_M&D_ Pynchon is simply mimicking the style of original 18th and 19th C.
texts which he would have come across in his research. At that time
capitalisation of nouns and noun phrases was just as likely to have been an
idiosyncratic decision made by the printer as by the author, and there
probably wasn't a common rule governing usage. It's because English loan
words come from so many different languages that our spelling conventions
are so inconsistent, and I guess if English had borrowed a term from a
language where it was usually capitalised then that punctuation would have
stuck for a time as well. There are still traces of the "unnecessary"
capitalisation of common nouns in Austen and Dickens, and even in newspapers
from the early part of the 20th C., and some of this style persists in legal
and political documents of today.

best


 

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