Bullwinkle58 -> RE: OT-Upper Case in English? (2/24/2012 2:06:05 PM)
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ORIGINAL: LoBaron This is for the native English speakers out there. What I remember from long gone past there are certain rules in English where to use upper case at the beginning of a word. IIRC this includes names (including sentences like "You are an American citizen"), month/weekdays and compass headings like "East" or "South". Is this correct? And am I missing some other word categories to which this rule applies as well? The replies you've gotten are correct so far as they go, but there's an easier method for this than trying to remember myriad classes of nouns needing capitalization. The rule is almost all proper nouns are capitalized, and common nouns are not. For a very good discource on the difference, with excursions into how other languages do things differently (German!!!), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proper_noun From the intro: "A proper noun or proper name is a noun representing a unique entity (such as London, Jupiter, John Hunter, or Toyota), as distinguished from a common noun, which represents a class of entities (or non-unique instance(s) of that class)—for example, city, planet, person or corporation. In English, proper nouns are not normally preceded by an article or other limiting modifier (such as any or some), and are used to denote a particular person, place, or object without regard to any descriptive meaning the word or phrase may have[2] (for example, a town called "Newtown" may be, but does not necessarily have to be, a new (recently built) town)."
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