From: D. Starner (shalesller@writeme.com)
Date: Thu Feb 17 2005 - 16:49:23 CST
"Hans Aberg" writes:
> Now mix capitalization in the bag: In natural languages, capitalization
> typically does not alter the semantics of the word.
That's not invariable; there are rare cases where capitalization alter
semantics. For example, Poles and poles are two different things. More
importantly, capitalization alters the meaning of the sentence and paragraph.
> However,
> capitalization can be used to communicate certain semantic information:
> Start of sentence, proper noun, (in German) noun, abbreviation, etc. If one
> sticks to the semantic approach, then one should add abstract characters
> "start of sentence", "proper noun", etc., zip out say the uppercase letters,
> and let the rendering machine make a correct presentation.
But that's not the complete list. There is a practically unlimited variety
of things that capital letters have been used for; any such list of characters
would be insufficent. Do you put the "noun" character before all nouns, just
in case we want to render this in a early modern English font that capitalizes
all nouns? What about pH? To try and handle capitaliztion like this may be
suitable for an English professor marking something up in TEI-Lite, but it's
shear madness for a character encoding standard. For all extents and purposes,
treating capital letters and small letters as different is the only sane way
to go, and I know of no character set that has done otherwise (and presumed
to support both.)
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