A reader writes:
how is it determined in texts when to capitalize letters and when not to, particularly in languages that have no distinction between capital and lower-case, and also when the writer does not use a captial (for example, I have seen Aquinas write the latin equivalent to "Catholic" with a little "c")?
There’s not a universal rule on this, but I can tell you what the general practice is.
First, though, lemme clarify for folks who may not be familiar with the issue: English and other languages that use the Latin alphabet (and variants on it) have both UPPER CASE and lower case letters. This ain’t the way it was originally, though.
The first alphabets did not have a distinction between upper case ("majuscule") and lower case ("minuscule") letters. They were written entirely in upper case letters. This applied to (among other languages) Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin.
This means that the Bible–all of it–was originally written in capital letters. The lower case letters you see in a modern Greek Bible came later and were subbed in by scribes and printers. The original manuscripts were all majuscules.
Over time (around the A.D. 600s), Greek developed a lower case alphabet. So did Latin. Other languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic) did not and still use only one kind of letter, traditionally referred to as "upper case" or "capital" letters, though this term is anachronistic as there is no alternative to this kind of letter in these languages.
Folks using Greek and Latin-derived alphabets got in the habit of mixing upper and lower case letters, typically using upper case letters (since they’re bigger) for the more important words. The habit of capitalizing certain words fell out from this.
Now. . . . If you’re translating a text that was originally written in all capital letters then there is only one thing to do when rendering it for folks used to reading lower case texts with an occasional capitalized words: Follow the rules of the receptor language. In other words, if you’re translating, say, a Hebrew text into English, you follow English rules about capitalization. That means that you capitalize the first words of sentences, proper nouns, acronyms, and possibly a few additional words (mostly or religious origin), depending on the rules that the publisher goes by.
The reason that this is the only thing to do is that the original text doesn’t contain any capitalization information that you could go by. It’s all upper case letters, with no words capitalized distinctly. The only alternative would be to render EVERY LETTER OF YOUR TRANSLATION IN CAPITAL LETTERS, WHICH IS HARD ON THE EYES AFTER A WHILE AND WHICH IN SOME CONTEXTS IS TAKEN TO INDICATE SHOUTING.
But what if your source text is one that contains a mix of lower and upper case letters, with some words capitalized. What do you do then?
If the languages are close enough in the rules they follow then you might make the decision to capitalize a word wherever the source text does. You might get away with that, for example, translating an Italian text into English.
But this strategy gets problematic if the rules the other language uses for capitalization are too different from English. For instance, German (I am given to understand) capitalizes basically every noun in a sentence. That will really annoy Your typical English Speaker after a While, don’t You think? I mean, Nobody wants to see that many capital Letters in a single Sentence. It gets irritating to have to switch Your Mind back and forth between upper Case and lower Case Emphasis when You aren’t used to doing It.
So the rule defaults back to obeying the conventions of the language that you’re translating into (English in this case).
What those rules are can be complex in and of itself. For one thing, the rules change over time. A hundred years ago English speakers capitalized many more words than they do now (for example, pronouns that have God as their referent). Today, most publishers don’t do that, though there is still a mix of conventions that different publishers will follow.
This affects other languages, too. I’ve seen some Latin documents that had words like "Catholic" in lower-case, but other, later documents that had it upper case.
But that’s the thing about languge: It’s always changing.
The German usage would be particulary hard in that people use capital letters as a Form Of Emphasis for common nouns, and it would certainly be misconstrued. (Meaning it would be a poor translation. 🙂
Also note the “Catholic” is an interesting case. Using the small letter indicates the adjective meaning “universal.” As when you describe a reader of all sorts of book as having catholic taste.
When you refer to the universality of the Catholic Church, you may use the lower-case c catholic to refer to the Church.
Incidentially, “upper-case” and “lower-case” refers to the two cases in which printers put the lead letters for their printing press. The lower-case letters would always be in the lower case (presumably because they were more used).
I still prefer to captitalize the Divine pronouns. I don’t think that the change to lower case (even for ‘god’ now when referring to YHWH) comes from faith, but from opposition.
And what moderately educated person would not be reading books at least a hundred years old?
As to Catholic, if the (pardon the use of the term) ‘denomination’ is meant, capitalization would seem to me to be correct, if the whole church universal is meant (including the orthodox and the separated brethren) then miniscule is ok. If one is using it in its original meaning of ‘universal’, and not referring to ekklesia tou Theou at all, then miniscule would I think, most certainly be correct.
I was also taught in school to capitalize the divine pronouns, and I prefer it that way too. But it can also get confusing when certain passages in the Bible can be read in two different ways (eg. spirit or Spirit), and the translators have to interpret one or the other reading.
I wonder what happened circa A.D. 600 that caused lower case letters to be invented. It doesn’t seem like an absolutely necessary invention.
When did spaces between words get invented? That seems like a no brainer to me.
BillyHW: A full answer to your question would take a bit more space that I feel would be appropriate, since this is not my weblog (this will be long enough as it is). But basically, majuscule and minuscule letters have actually both existed from antiquity; they were just used for different things. Over time, it became common to use all minuscule letters for the body of a text, and majuscule for the titles & chapter headings (hence the name “capital”). The minuscule letters which we use (our lower-case) were more or less developed under Charlemagne ca. AD 800, and were revived by the Renaissance humanists in the 1400’s (who mistakenly thought that they were ancient Roman, not Carolingian). Our upper-case are essentially the same as the ancient Roman Square Capital (used by the Romans almost exclusively for inscriptions on monuments, but occasionally used in the Middle Ages onward as a capital/title script, and again revived in the Renaissance). This is the origin of our use of capitals at the beginning of particularly important words (though various languages/nations have various definitions of what is “particularly important”).
As for spacing, the Romans used that, too, at least in their private writing. It wasn’t used in inscriptions, though, or in formal books for a combination of reasons, mostly boiling down to presentation (the pretty, symmetrical block of letters was considered more artistically important than legibility) and cost (marble & vellum ain’t cheap, not to mention the engraver’s/scribe’s fee, so you need to cram as much into one line as possible). Spacing and punctuation were used sproadically through the middle ages (again, sometimes omitted for aesthetic/financial reasons), and became more universal again under the Carolingians (though the punctuation marks weren’t formalized for many centuries)
Eats, Shoots And Leaves has a good overview on the history of punctuation.
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Was there no way, “jot or tittle” to determine what is God versus god? Is there a distinction between He and he? In language there is logic. If a sentence in the bible says “and He said to me” we know God is speaking not someone else. In understanding what God is you have to understand that logic. If X= ab and then later you know that ab=10 then you then know that X=10. Also, unless told otherwise, x does not = 10. This directly impacts whether you believe in God as a “being” that literally walks, talks, has a white beard and sits on a throne or whether that is figurative. Or whether God is Love,God is Good, Wisdom, Life, Beauty, Knowledge, Alpha and Omega, etc. Are we to listen for a literal voice? Or do we listen to what Love tells us, Wisdom, Life, Beauty, Good, etc. Do we search for a being? Or do we search for Wisdom, Beauty, Knowledge. Good… If God heals, is that God as a figure or God as Knowlege, Love,… Isnt Knowlege, Science. Does not Science heal? The more we grow in God, Science the more we can heal. Billions of souls are alive today to attest to that. But importantly the difference between god and God would also logically be that God contains Love, Beauty, Knowlege, Wisdome, Life,… Those are all basically the same thing, different facets of the same thing. Godly love would thus be Love that is Beautiful, Good, and Wise, etc. Someone could say they love someone but if its an abusive relationship it wouldnt be a Godly Love because it does not contain Beauty and Wisdom. Conversely the most knowlegable man in the world without Love or care for Beauty would also be folly, it would be mans knowlege not Godly Knowlege.
If I were to ask, “What would God have me do?” Am I asking a “godly being” or would it be wise to ask “What does Knowledge say to do, Wisdom, Goodness, Love,… Depending on what parts of the bible you take to be literal or figurative can depend on the logic you use to determine what God is. One has to know what God is in order to know what He says or asks. Is “He” figurative for Love, Wisdom, Knowlege, Beauty, Live, the All in All, the Alpha and Omega, the sum laws of the universe, the Cosmos… that kind of God. or a bearded white guy on a cloud? It seems many people today speak of God in a pegan sense not a literal sense. They see God as a literal “He” not God = Love…
Sorry for the long post, just something thats been jumbling in my mind.