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weird question about 18th/19th century English

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The Wrath

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Read the following quote from James Madison:

"...slavery is a Moral, and political Evil, and that Whoever brings forward in the Respective States, some General, rational and Liberal plan, for the Gradual Emancipation of Slaves, will deserve Well of his Country."

I've noticed this in quite a few quotes from that time period. Why the hell are all those words capitalized? I understand that there were different grammar rules back then, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some are capitalized and some aren't. Some of them are nouns, some adjectives. My first thought was "the important words are capitalized." Then I see the words "whoever" and "respective." Can anyone explain that?

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Look at the Declaration and Constitution--capitalization follows the Germanic rule of capitalizing most nouns. This particular quote probably got some of the capitalization wrong and some of it may be due to the transition to our current practice of only capitalizing proper names.

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This is straight out of a book written by a Pulitzer Prize winning historian (Joseph Ellis), so I doubt he got the capitalization wrong. And there are some adjectives in there too. As I recall, the same is true of the Declaration.

Edited by Moose
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In the Declaration I see that most nouns (perhaps not pronouns--I didn't look all the way through) are capitalized according to the German language style. Although I have to wonder if the 's' was not yet invented, or if their printing press was lacking it and they just decided, "Fcrew it".

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Although I have to wonder if the 's' was not yet invented, or if their printing press was lacking it and they just decided, "Fcrew it".
Fo sunny. They're doing the Greek thing, so they have a recognizable "s" at the end of the word, but the more sigma-like thing elsewhere. It's actually different from "f" in not being crossed (it does seem to have a tiny jot). The "ct" ligature is just bizarre.
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Read the following quote from James Madison:

"...slavery is a Moral, and political Evil, and that Whoever brings forward in the Respective States, some General, rational and Liberal plan, for the Gradual Emancipation of Slaves, will deserve Well of his Country."

I've noticed this in quite a few quotes from that time period. Why the hell are all those words capitalized? I understand that there were different grammar rules back then, but there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason as to why some are capitalized and some aren't. Some of them are nouns, some adjectives. My first thought was "the important words are capitalized." Then I see the words "whoever" and "respective." Can anyone explain that?

Perhaps the writer has capitalized those words which, in his mind, he would emphasize if he were speaking aloud.

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The point is, there was no clear rule at that time.

This is what I was starting to think but, as aleph pointed out, it does appear that nouns tend to be capitalized, so that partly explains it. It still doesn't explain the adjectives though.

Although I have to wonder if the 's' was not yet invented, or if their printing press was lacking it and they just decided, "Fcrew it".

This is another thing that annoys me. Similar to how Romanesque buildings will substitute V for U in any writing on the building. That's not quite as annoying though, since the letters actually look pretty similar.

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It still doesn't explain the adjectives though.
I don't know if anyone has done a detailed study of the practice, but from what I know, there is a tendency to capitalize nouns and adjectives (which are a grammatical class), and the tendency is stronger in nouns than in adjectives -- I think the adjectives got capitalized via their nouniness. In modern German, nouns do it, regularly, so that's a hard rule; the rules of the pre-modern era were sloppy. That's why it's tendencies and not laws.
This is another thing that annoys me. Similar to how Romanesque buildings will substitute V for U in any writing on the building.
Bear in mind that in Latin, u and v were not distinct letters, not were i and j, so it's following that spelling fact of the Roman language.
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The usage in English at that time was to capitalize words based on perceived importance. It was supposed to reflect which words would be more stressed in oratory.

German did a similar thing, but since capitalization was fixed to nouns they used spaces so if you read 19th century German, you see a lot of things like:

The i m p o r t a n c e of the matter at hand is beyond m e a s u r i n g.

English never had the German capitalization rule. English capitalization was always a haphazard affair until 20th century norms.

It looks like in the 20th century there was less stress on oratory, so writing normalized to the simple rules it has, although you still find attempts at stress using italics, though only with a few words.

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Can you explain why verbs are not considered to be important?

Try reading it out loud in your best oratory and see if you think you should stress the verbs.

Mostly its a matter of rhythm. So why is it:

General, rational and Liberal plan

and not:

general, rational, and liberal Plan

as it would be in German? or even:

General, Rational and Liberal Plan

as it would be if you were right?

In this case 2 of three adjectives are capitalized but not the noun. The writer wants "General" and "Liberal" to stand out and "rational" and "plan" to be more supporting rhythm.

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Try reading it out loud in your best oratory and see if you think you should stress the verbs.
This is rationalism at its nadir. Verbs very often demand rhetorical stress; why can't they have it if this stress theory were right? Because of the rule itself. Why is the rule variable? Because it is optional. Inspect the following first few lines from Gulliver's Travels:

I HOPE you will be ready to own publickly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent Urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels; with Direction to hire some young Gentlemen of either University to put them in Order, and correct the Style, as my Cousin Dampier did by my Advice, in his Book called A Voyage round the World. But I do not remember I gave you Power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted: therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that Kind; particularly a Paragraph about her Majesty the late Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious Memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human Species.

What rule is being followed here? Do you know why the first two words are capitalized (entirely).

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Inspect the following first few lines from Gulliver's Travels:

I HOPE you will be ready to own publickly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent Urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels; with Direction to hire some young Gentlemen of either University to put them in Order, and correct the Style, as my Cousin Dampier did by my Advice, in his Book called A Voyage round the World. But I do not remember I gave you Power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted: therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that Kind; particularly a Paragraph about her Majesty the late Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious Memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human Species.

What rule is being followed here? Do you know why the first two words are capitalized (entirely).

It seems in this passage that every noun (excepting "thing") is capitalized. I think the first two words are in all caps because it is the opening of a letter.

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It seems in this passage that every noun (excepting "thing") is capitalized. I think the first two words are in all caps because it is the opening of a letter.
Yes, correct. The initial capitalization thing is an example of "aesthetic capitalization". You see this particularly with Medieval manuscripts, that the first letter will be very large and ornate, a true work of manuscript art. That practice fell by the wayside (along with monks laboring over the lettering) but still persists for example in The Constitution, and was replaced with the practice of starting works with capitalized words as in Swift. This fell out of favor eventually, because of changes in typographic aesthetics (the move to a 'ligher' style that we now use). This "lighter aesthetics" was responsible in part for the general change in capitalization rules in non-German.
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This is rationalism at its nadir. Verbs very often demand rhetorical stress; why can't they have it if this stress theory were right? Because of the rule itself. Why is the rule variable? Because it is optional. Inspect the following first few lines from Gulliver's Travels:

I HOPE you will be ready to own publickly, whenever you shall be called to it, that by your great and frequent Urgency you prevailed on me to publish a very loose and uncorrect Account of my Travels; with Direction to hire some young Gentlemen of either University to put them in Order, and correct the Style, as my Cousin Dampier did by my Advice, in his Book called A Voyage round the World. But I do not remember I gave you Power to consent that any thing should be omitted, and much less that any thing should be inserted: therefore, as to the latter, I do here renounce every thing of that Kind; particularly a Paragraph about her Majesty the late Queen Anne, of most pious and glorious Memory; although I did reverence and esteem her more than any of human Species.

What rule is being followed here? Do you know why the first two words are capitalized (entirely).

That is rationalism in any form? He's talking about language style.

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