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:
“Our life is a faint tracing on the surface of mystery, like the idle, curved tunnels of leaf miners on the face of a leaf. We must somehow take a wider view, look at the whole landscape, really see it, and describe what’s going on here. Then we can at least wail the right question into the swaddling band of darkness, or, if it comes to that, choir the proper praise.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“Ideas about life organize perception; names of emotions organize sensations; rules of syntax organize thought. But pain comes on its own.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)