Capitalization and Proper Names
In languages that use alphabetic scripts and that distinguish lower and upper case, there is usually an association between proper names and capitalization. (A prominent exception is German, in which all nouns are capitalized.) The details are complex, and vary sharply from language to language: for proper names, as for several other kinds of words and phrases. For example, expressions for days of the week and months of the year are capitalized in English, but not in Spanish, French, Swedish, or Finnish, though they may be understood as proper names in all of these. Languages differ in whether most elements of multiword proper names are capitalized (American English has House of Representatives, in which lexical words are capitalized) or only the initial element (as in Slovenian Državni zbor, "National Assembly"). In Czech, multiword settlement names are capitalized throughout, but non-settlement names are only capitalized in the initial element, though with many exceptions.
Read more about this topic: Proper Noun
Famous quotes containing the words proper names, proper and/or names:
“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)
“Out of coils,
Unscrewed, released, no more to be marvelous,
I shall walk straightly through most proper halls
Proper myself, princess of properness.”
—Gwendolyn Brooks (b. 1917)
“A knowledge that people live close by is,
I think, enough. And even if only first names are ever exchanged
The people who own them seem rock-true and marvelously self-sufficient.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)