Capitals in M&D

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

These are the sort of spelling and Capitalization writing conventions one would find in materials published during the Colonial era in what was about to become the United States of America. Noah Webster was developing the first dictionary of "American" English at the time. In pre-"Websterized" written English, normalized, consistent rules for capitalization and spelling were absent. I remember an edition of Bartholomew Fair, where the spelling was deliberately (and quite creatively) inconsistent, in order to more accurately reflect the actual pronunciations of the characters in the play. Mark Twain did a similar thing in "Huck Finn." The lack of consistency is the point. This individualizes the speech patterns of the characters in the works mentioned. 

http://books.google.com/books?vid=ISBN1419108999&id=waCtwcOgcqgC&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=bartholomew+fair&sig=Su5TlveqGIneAP7NwMUzcLfvX4g

 http://lexrex.com/bios/nwebster.htm

 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: "Ya Sam" <takoitov at hotmail.com>
> Another question for M&D connoisseurs. What is the principle of the (mock) 
> 18th century capitalisation in this novel? Initially I thought it was quite 
> simple: all the nounse are capitalised. But it turned out that some were 
> not. I failed to see any systematic pattern there. If you know about the 
> subject could you please enlighten me a bit?
> 
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