Message-ID: <Pine.NEB.4.64.0903090211410.15303@panix3.panix.com>
From: Alan Sondheim <sondheim@panix.com>
To: Cyb <cybermind@listserv.aol.com>, Wryting-L <WRYTING-L@listserv.wvu.edu>,
Cyberculture <cyberculture@zacha.org>
Subject: [Humanist] 22.602 lower-case man (fwd) - fascinating - alan
Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 02:11:55 -0400 (EDT)
---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Mon, 9 Mar 2009 06:07:14 +0000 (GMT) From: Humanist Discussion Group <willard.mccarty@mccarty.org.uk> Reply-To: Online seminar for digital humanities <humanist@lists.digitalhumanities.org> To: humanist@lists.digitalhumanities.org Subject: [Humanist] 22.602 lower-case man Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 22, No. 602. Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist Submit to: humanist@lists.digitalhumanities.org Date: Sun, 08 Mar 2009 12:28:33 -0500 From: Alan Corre <corre@uwm.edu> Subject: Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 22, No. 598 to steven totosy i wish i had the guts to do what you do, namely use only lower case, altho you make the perhaps worthy exception of items like US and URL. do you do this all the time? i have long believed that when computers came in, we should have dumped the upper case entirely. when i started using computers around 1975, we used a character set as the default called FIELDATA (of military origin) which was all caps. it was unfortunate that they chose the upper case letters, rather than the lower case letters, because upper case letters look as if you are screaming at your interlocutor, and ascii, pardon me, ASCII, soon came in and averted a revolution. let's consider some aspects of this situation. the existence of upper and lower cases in roman script is a pure fluke. originally they used all one or all the other, the lower case probably coming into existence because it was easier when using a quill rather than a chisel, or, to put it another way, lower case in a cursive in disguise. the horrendous mixing of cases is the bane of schoolchildren, yet it has minimal value. at one time most languages capitalized nouns; english did until the end of the eighteenth century, danish did in the twentieth century. the rules of capitalisation vary enormously from one language to another, and the "usually caps" comment one sees in dictionaries is enough to tell us that the matter is still fluid. and why begin a sentence with upper case? it merely duplicates the function of the preceding period, or full stop as the british call it. this kind of duplication occurred in the russian script until the revolution. letters were followed by a hard sign or a soft sign; the revolution abolished the hard sign in most places with the claimed result that the works of tolstoy became one third shorter. and nothing was lost. hebrew gets along very nicely with only a single case, altho it retains a superfluous shape of five letters at the end of words, a feature which persists in english in the pharmacist's "Px" which is really is just a decorative form of R to abbreviate the latin word "recipe!" (Take!) an instruction to the pharmacist, and in the dutch ending ij to represent a long i. and then there is the question whether the second person pronoun should begin with an upper case letter out of respect to the recipient. story has it that some russian schoolkids wrote a nice letter to putin and failed to capitalize the russian word Vj. putin ordered the school authorities to punish the children for being impolite. thank god, our president would not do that, in fact, he always colloquially finishes his press conferences "thank-youguise" (which is not the same as thank-you, guys by the way.) what stands in the way of my conversion to the lowercasism which I am advocating? mainly, I think, the ongoing pernicious influence of my dominies. when the dutch intelligently abolished the accusative case which persisted in dutch only orthographically, and had long been abandoned in standard speech, good queen wilhemina announced that she had written "den" rather than "de" for the article when grammar required it all her life, and she didn't plan to change. i bet she got a vision of disapproving schoolmarms. change...can I? Don't bet on it. alan d. corre _______________________________________________ List posts to: humanist@lists.digitalhumanities.org List info and archives at at: http://digitalhumanities.org/humanist Listmember interface at: http://digitalhumanities.org/humanist/Restricted/listmember_interface.php Subscribe at: http://www.digitalhumanities.org/humanist/membership_form.php