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.
