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 and/or names:
“All ceremonies are in themselves very silly things; but yet, a man of the world should know them. They are the outworks of Manners and Decency, which would be too often broken in upon, if it were not for that defence, which keeps the enemy at a proper distance.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“When the Day of Judgement dawns and the great conquerors and lawyers and statesmen come to receive their rewards—their crowns, their laurels, their names carved indelibly upon imperishable marble—the Almighty will turn to Peter and will say, not without a certain envy when he sees us coming with our books under our arms, “Look, these need no reward. We have nothing to give them here. They have loved reading.””
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)