Messages : 23
Langue: English
ceigered (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 11:27:25
Do people from other cultures find all-caps titles rude or imposing? Or is this more about personal opinion/style than cultural differences? From my experience (being someone who's never stepped outside my own country before), unnecessary all-caps writing is extremely commonplace in this advertisement saturated society that it's of no concern. But it seems to be that different countries may have different policies in regards to advertising etc that may mean that people perceive things like all-caps writing differently (assuming that it's most common environment is in advertising).
Of course, in a paragraph, if everything's written in uppercase, or if a random sentence is in uppercase (e.g. I was looking for my dog, but I COULDN'T FIND IT!!!"), it's probably going to be interpreted as yelling or emphasis. But is such emphasis in a title a bad thing for people outside of various parts of the anglosphere?
(And I guess this thread would also be suitable for discussion about how capitalisation occurs with country names, nationals (people from certain countries) and languages.)
Miland (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 11:39:04
qwertz (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 12:00:48
ceigered:For example, would one title an announcement thread as "ESPERANTO FINVENKAS" or would international opinion dictate that "Esperanto finvenkas / Esperanto Finvenkas" is more suitable?Pooo~~. An uppercased FINSUKCESO advertisment.
Fina Venko (eo.wikipedia.org)
The current thread relates to 2010-05-21 23:48:54
darkweasel (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 13:29:56
Titles are more variable: both the Romance style of capitalizing only the first word of the title and the English style of capitalizing all lexical words are found.If someone writes all titles in uppercase, that's fine to me. All of those are actually fine to me:
159 HOMOJ MORTAS PRO AEROPLANA AKCIDENTO EN HINDUJO
159 Homoj Mortas Pro Aeroplana Akcidento En Hindujo
159 Homoj Mortas pro Aeroplana Akcidento en Hindujo
159 homoj mortas pro aeroplana akcidento en Hindujo
However, there should be some kind of convention on their use. The first variant should either be used always or never, otherwise it seems like some of the messages are more important than others.
Unfortunately PMEG doesn't say a lot:
ONI IAFOJE SKRIBAS NUR PER MAJUSKLOJ, EKZEMPLE EN TITOLOJ AŬ POR EMFAZI.Concerning names of peoples, there are not really fixed rules in Esperanto. In the Fundamento we find rusoj but Rusujanoj, and I mostly capitalize according to this, but others may write Rusoj and even others may write rusujanoj. Unfortunately my Fundamento-like usage results in ugly things like alvenis tri japanoj, du Nederlandanoj, ses serboj kaj kvin Usonanoj ...
ceigered (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 14:22:48
darkweasel:However, there should be some kind of convention on their use. The first variant should either be used always or never, otherwise it seems like some of the messages are more important than others.I see the problem you identify. Other than forcing all titles to be in upper-case, however, there aren't many catch-all methods for maintaining consistency.
Concerning names of peoples, there are not really fixed rules in Esperanto. In the Fundamento we find rusoj but Rusujanoj, and I mostly capitalize according to this, but others may write Rusoj and even others may write rusujanoj. Unfortunately my Fundamento-like usage results in ugly things like alvenis tri japanoj, du Nederlandanoj, ses serboj kaj kvin Usonanoj ...I wouldn't call it ugly but I see the seemingly irregular pattern occurring - while on one hand I'd like to do what I normally do in English, there is the feeling that I'm sort of cheating by not doing what the fundamento prescribes.
Miland:However I wouldn't have thought that we'd need it much here, unless we're humorously indicating that something is Really Important.Dear Sir, Are You Mocking The Gravity of This Issue? Clearly This Is A Case Which Concerns The Very Future Of Esperanto!
(interestingly, that occurs on the website tvtropes.org - an in-text link will have it's first letters capitalised, e.g.
tvtropes.org:Sometimes, Popcultural Osmosis only works part of the way, and as a result, certain famous works or events are only known for one or two lines.(underlining representing otherwise blue links)
For example, Everybody Knows That Martin Luther King Jr. made a famous speech where he pronounced "I have a dream"... though — sad as it may be — it's getting increasingly rarer to find people who could tell you anything else about that speech, or what it was even about.
darkweasel (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 14:29:50
ceigered:No, feel free to do like in English - as I said, there are no uniform rules about this. Nobody will complain if you write usonano. Really.
I wouldn't call it ugly but I see the seemingly irregular pattern occurring - while on one hand I'd like to do what I normally do in English, there is the feeling that I'm sort of cheating by not doing what the fundamento prescribes.
Unfortunately I cannot do like in German - that would look like this:
Per ĉi tiu Tujmesaĝilo vi povas babili kun aliaj Uzantoj de lernu!. Por ekigi la Mesaĝilon, alklaku unu el la supraj Butonoj. Pliaj Informoj troveblas ĉe "Helppaĝoj".
ceigered (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 15:35:27
Let's spare a thought for the Hebrew speakers learning Esperanto - after all, their capital letters (for want of a better term) come at the end of their words regardless of whether the word's a noun, verb or adjective
Miland (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 15:44:22
ceigered:Dear Sir, Are You Mocking The Gravity of This Issue? Clearly This Is A Case Which Concerns The Very Future Of Esperanto!
Do you mean The Fina Venko? 
erinja (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 17:46:26
Standard modern Esperanto also very frequently does not capitalize names of months, though the Fundamento did. We do not capitalize days of the week - not in the Fundamento, and not today.
My advice - there is a wide range of usage both in the Fundamento itself and in the usage of the modern Esperanto community. Don't stress yourself out over capitalization. In my opinion the norm seems to be to capitalize country names, but not to capitalize the inhabitants of the countries, the languages, days of the week, or months of the year. But if you choose differently, it isn't necessarily wrong (though there does seem to be pretty much 100% agreement not to capitalize days of the week, so if you're going to pick something to capitalize, I definitely wouldn't choose that)
Donniedillon (Voir le profil) 22 mai 2010 18:53:45