Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Capitalization can be a function of either the
word or its context.
Wiktionary only needs to be concerned with the former. It would seem
that the drafters of the Declaration of Independance took a little
liberty with their emphases, and that's not unusual in preambles. I
don't know why you abject to the lack of capitalization in "defence".
'sic' is not an objection. It is the Latin word for 'so, thus'
and is used to indicate that an unusual feature of a quoted text is
present in the original--i.e. 'it was thus given'--and is not due to
editorial oversight. The unusual feature of 'defence' is that it is the
only noun in that preamble that is not capitalized--all the other ones
are; the point being that the framers of the Constitution[1] were
writing English where nouns are regularly capitalized. This is not a
feature of emphasis, and was carried on through even mundane regions
of subsequent text:
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the
several States which may be included within this Union, according
to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding
to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to
Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed,
three fifths[sic] of all other Persons.
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article01/
Current en.wiktionary practice _will_ require separate articles for
[[number]] (modern practice) and [[Number]] (former practice), which
I don't think is at all reasonable; redirecting from [[Number]] to
[[number]] would be a thinkable alternative (and is what happens
currently), but even the removal of these redirects has its advocates.
If capitalization is as integral to spelling as the advocates of this
recent move have been insisting, then to divorce [[number]] from
[[Number]] is to rob us of our linguistic history.
If the Bund für vereinfachte rechtschreibung [sic] were to have its way
and la Germanophonie were to do away with the obligatory capitalization
of nouns, what would de.wiktionary do with [[kind]] and [[Kind]]? This
is not a hypothetical situation, as this has already happened in English
and the Scandinavian languages, and is something Wiktionary _has to
document_, as 'all words in all languages' implies 'in all ages' as
well.
*Muke!
[1] The text quoted was not the Declaration of Independence, however
topical it would have been to post it about now.
Yes the reference to the DoI was my error.
It is to be noted that the peculiar capitalization in the articles of
the Constitution does not generally extend to the amendments. The
latest amendment to have any of these antiquated capitalization was the
12th and it went through Congress in 1803. Deos the use of the word
"Citizens" in the 11th amendment mean anything different than the word
"citizens" in the 26th? I don't know if there was any change in the
capitalizations in the 27th between the time it was introduced and the
time it was ratified.
I was looking for a scanned copy of the original Constitution but the
only one that I did find was not readable. If you really want to be
accurate about 18th century texts, maybe we should be considering
support of the long "s".
Ec