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Re: Capitalization conventions for Debian release names



On Friday 26 April 2002 12:19 am, Osamu Aoki wrote:
>[snip]

osamu, please don't consider my commentary as any criticism of your 
contribution to the documentation project. while i haven't read the full text 
of your contribution, simply because it is so comprehensive, the only point i 
wished to make is that david's suggestions, as far as capitalization is 
concerned, simply appealed to my own aesthetic sense of how the appearance of 
the text would best be appreciated by the general public.

what i am aware of, in terms of your contribution, i totally respect and 
applaud. you have, as far as i have been able to observe, invested a whole 
lot more than any other individual author of the text involved in the 
project. in fact, i have been moved to envy your energy as evidenced by your 
enthusiastic contribution. i mean this with the fullest respect.

while my agreement with david's assertions as to accommodating the general 
public's understanding and anticipation of common syntactic usage being 
proven by appropriate common name, common noun capitalization, the reasoning 
behind that agreement is that those issues of capitalization of nouns and 
names are quite as important to english, as written by various 
english-speaking culture, is as proper caligraphy is to japanese 
scribes--and, again, please do not assume that i would necessarily favor any 
one linguistic expression over another. in fact, my brother--who lives in 
tokyo, and is a huge advocate of pictorial language--and i--an advocate of 
syntax over semantics--have no greater argument than about that particular 
issue. his argument is that consensual agreement over the quality of 
pictorial or calligraphical annunciation is far more precise an indication of 
meaning than that expressed by any attempt at gutteral or dissonant 
pronunciation in english. i offer this information about our internal 
familial dispute in the hope that you will understand that i am personally 
confounded by and envious of your ability to intellectually operate in both 
of those worlds. so, given that perspective, accept that i do not, in any 
way, assume any right to attempt to achieve any effect or result that would 
not first require that i acknowledge my respect for anyone i meet in the 
world.

as far as current issue are concerned, as i said before, i agree with those 
literal rules of diction that david suggested. 

ben


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