User talk:SnowyCinema/Improper capitalizations

Hi Philmonte101. This is an interesting topic you've cottoned onto. I don't agree that there are proper and improper capitalisations, per se, but I would generally agree that there is no need to create capitalised entries for words that a generally uncapitalised since they are common nouns. That said, with bird names the actual English names are in a bit of a twilight zone as to whether they are common nouns or proper nouns. In ornithological literature they are often capitalised (e.g. Grey-tailed Tattler) to indicate that this is the accepted "common name" for the bird, as a correlate of the proper scientific name. Here the term "common name" has a specific ornithological sense. There is a tendency towards regularisation of all common names for birds in English (and probably some other major languages), though at present there is still a lot of variation. The fact is, there is a grey area between common and proper nouns. However, to return to Lexicon/lexicon ... why not a separate entry for LEXICON which also meets CFI? Same goes for Chernozemic. Obviously a waste of time and effort - it is merely a systematic spelling variation. I don't even think it is useful or necessary to note that certain words are sometimes capitalised. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 13:01, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@User:Sonofcawdrey Thank you so much for noticing for commenting. My position on it is like what I was taught from English class; you shouldn't capitalize common nouns unless they're based on proper nouns (eponyms), or other special cases, such as taxonomical names (which would be in the "Translingual" section here anyway I believe), and Chickadee is not the animal's taxonomical name. I understand that our position here on Wiktionary is very open to many different words and capitalizations and such, but I am with you on this, I feel that miscapitalizations generally shouldn't be entries just because they were miscapitalized because of technicality, uniqueness, or complexness. I feel like words should have miscapitalization entries if, say, the person thinks it's an eponym but it's not, or if it's an extremely common and well known miscapitalization for some other reason. I don't think Chickadee should make it. That's why I created this; to show users that miscapitalizations can be done for a variety of different reasons, including those that would deem it ridiculous to have entries for all the miscapitalizations that had 3 quotations, of which I've only found 1, and I've found 1 out of these 6 or 7 terms that would be attested, that means going through the entire English language assuming I'd find 3 quotes for 1 out of every 6 or 7 terms; that's tens of thousands (at least) of miscapitalization entries. Anyway, you get the idea. I'm planning to bring this up in BP at some point, but not until I find more examples of technically attested terms and put them here. Philmonte101 (talk) 16:17, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

By the way you can continue to comment here if you please. I just moved it to the talk page here because I didn't want the comment to be added to the list itself. Philmonte101 (talk) 18:21, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi @Philmonte101, sure, I wasn't suggesting that bird names needed entries - just that they are often capitalised for a reason, rather than just illogically capitalised like most of the terms you list. I think they are one category of commonly capitalised common nouns that do not need entries in a dictionary ... and there would be upwards of 10000 of them in any case (ignoring variant bird names)!! Cheers. - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 02:31, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

(moved from the user page:) Comment: species names are very frequently capitalized to make it clear that they are not simply adjectives. For instance, if I write that I observed "a brown rat," it isn't clear whether it is Rattus norvegicus, or a member of any number of other rat species that are typically brown. It's therefore a stylistic choice; not an error. In the case of "Chickadee," however, it doesn't refer to a species, so the capitalization is misplaced. Cheers, Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:56, 12 August 2016 (UTC)