What's in a proper noun? (use of upper-case letters)

名前 : フラン　ロリン (JP)
nom: Fran Lorin (FR)
naam: Fran Lorin (NL)
Naam: Fran Lorin (DE)
name: Fran Lorin (EN)

Four languages, but only two versions of a proper noun (my name). As a limited sampling of languages, two observations can be made regarding the use of upper-case letters: 1) in latin-based or germanic languages, the first letter of any proper noun (there are two here) is capitalized, i.e., an upper-case letter is used; and, 2) not all languages have an upper-case version of their script, but in Japanese, in particular, the katakana syllabary is used for a western name (rather than Kanji or Chinese characters, which are normally used for Japanese personal names). Similarly, Arabic has no upper-case version of their script. However, Russian and Greek scripts do.

At one time, a few hundred years ago in England, there was much debate on whether all nouns should be capitalized, or only a subset of nouns. As English-speaking people well know, capitalization is now only used in a limited number of linguistic situations: first letter of a sentence, proper nouns, acronyms (as well as initialisms and other specific kinds of abbreviations), and for emphasis. [David Crystal, "The Cambridge Encyclopedia of The English Language", 1995, University of Cambridge] A unique feature of German is that all nouns are capitalized.

It is important, when performing a text search of latin- or germanic-language documents, to take into account upper-case letters, whenever appropriate. Many text search query engines will give results that include both upper-case and lower-case letters, when only lower-case is used in the query, but will give only capitalized forms when an upper-case letter is used anywhere in the query. An example is IXQUICK.COM, a Netherlands-based search engine that typically gives about 30-50 results for any query, rather than the multitudes of results that other engines, such as Google, give.

Francis "Fran" Lorin
siberkhem.com