Re: Bug#640326: makedic package description
Ben Finney wrote:
> Justin B Rye <jbr@edlug.org.uk> writes:
>> These two conventions collide most obviously for Japanese "[Kk]anji",
>> "[Hh]iragana", and "[Kk]atakana", with the added twist that it's not
>> clear whether "[Kk]ana" gets to count as a script in its own right or
>> whether it's just a general category like "hieroglyphs".
>
> I would say:
>
> If one is naming a particular writing system, that's naming a unique
> individual thing in the world, and so gets capitalised like any other
> proper noun in English. Hence: Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana.
The trouble with this justification is that the category of "proper
nouns" is distinctly arbitrary - best defined as the set of things we
feel like capitalising. Why would it include "Kanji" and not for
instance "binary" or "question mark" or indeed "tikka masala"? If it
was really a matter of objective logic you'd think other languages
would follow the same scheme.
> If one is referring to a collection of items – glyphs from the writing
> system – then it's not naming one thing as a proper noun and so doesn't
> get capitalised in English. Hence: kanji, hiragana, katakana.
Yes, this is an extra obviously-lowercase context that really only
applies for CJK scripts - it's equivalent to "letters" rather than to
"Hebrew"; I would say that none of the references to kana or kanji in
these package descriptions use the words in this sense.
--
JBR with qualifications in linguistics, experience as a Debian
sysadmin, and probably no clue about this particular package
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