Why did authors from Astell's time distribute initial capital letters in the apparently erratic way that they did?
And I quoted Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Introduction to Late Modern English, 2009:
The use of extra initial capitals, according to Osselton, steadily increased during the first half of the eighteenth century to about 100 per cent around the 1750s after which this practice was drastically reduced and, fifty years later, abandoned completely. The reason for giving up the practice to capitalise all nouns was pressure from writers, who felt that they could not longer make use of capitals to emphasize individual words, as they had been accustomed to do before such idiosyncratic use of capitals was standardised by the printers.
This doesn't really answer the question asked today in an email from Joseph Huang, who links to my 2016 post, and asks: "I saw your blog post about capitalization. I am wondering whether you have studied capitalization in the Constitution."
It appears to me most of the nouns, if not all, are capitalized. For example, in the preamble, I only find "defence" is not capitalized, all the other nouns are capitalized.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
All the nouns in Art. 1 Sec. 1 are capitalized.
"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."
"Vacancies" in Art. 1 Sec. 2 Clause 4 is not capitalized.
"When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies."
The 11th Amendment was passed by Congress on March 4, 1794, and ratified by the states on February 7, 1795. In this amendment, there is a significantly smaller percentage of nouns capitalized. But Judicial (adj), Citizens, Subjects, Foreign (adj) State are still capitalized. So such capitalization means Citizens and State are proper nouns? But what about Judicial and Foreign? Note that law and equity are not capitalized, but they are capitalized in the Constitution (Art. III Sec. 2).
"The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."
This is confusing to me: how the drafters of the Constitution and the amendments decide what to capitalize? Are you aware of any linguistic studies of capitalization in the Constitution and the amendments?
Short answer: No. Maybe some commenters will contribute references to relevant linguistic studies?
But I am aware of some work by legal scholars that makes a relevant point, e.g. Akhil Reed Amar, "Our Forgotten Constitution: A Bicentennial Comment", The Yale Law Journal 1987:
This is a story about the Constitution that begins with some rather shocking facts: The parchment that all of us — practitioners, judges, scholars — have been using for the last century as the definitive copy of the supreme law of the land, is not. The handwritten, handsigned document enshrined in the National Archives and reprinted everywhere was never ratified by "We the People of the United States." Even the Senate is on record as acknowledging that this revered document has virtually no legal significance. No kidding.
Fortunately, the document that was ratified by Americans in the late 1780's — an edition printed in New York several days after the signing of the parchment in Philadelphia — bears a close resemblance to the text we have all grown up with. Although the official printed archetype of the Constitution (whose existence has for many years been a well kept if unintended secret) is marked by different punctuation and capitalization, the words are the same as those in the familiar parchment. Thus, the National Archives version is probably good enough for government work.
In other words, constitutional capitalization was a stochastic sociolinguistic process. It might be revealing to construct a statistical model of capitalization practices in the relevant regions of time and space, but I don't think anyone has done it.
July 23, 2024 @ 10:50 am · Filed by Mark Liberman under Orthography