Muke Tever wrote:
Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Muke Tever wrote:
In the US, and probably in other places where spelling is not phonetic, one of the most common uses for a dictionary (if not the most common) is to find what the correct spelling of a word is. If there is not "spell check" in the form of redirects or see-unders, then the Wiktionary is useless for this.
When a word is correctly spelled in several ways, every alternative is as good as the other and deserve its own article. It should therefore be abundantly clear that they are correct. As a consequence of the massive rename action many thousands of redirects have been created words like "Lightbulb" are now correct because there is a redirect ?? So the spelling of a sentence like: "A Lightbulb Is Typically Found In A Lamp." is apparantly correct?? I think not.
Capitalization is separate from spelling (though both are parts of orthography). Your sentence is spelled correctly, though capitalized unusually.
In any case, free capitalization of words is quite common--it occur in titles of works ("Antique Lightbulbs of the Early 19th Century"), in advertising ("Save Today on Great Unbeatable Prices"), in any case where a word is given a special kind of emphasis ("it wasn't just a smell, it was a Smell"), is used as a title of address ("you're not listening to me, Mother"), is made into a proper noun ("he was a Zealot"), etc., and formerly also optionally of nouns in general.
One of the most venerated documents in our country begins: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence [sic], 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.
The only words never take normal capitalization are those that are decreed to be so from technical context, such as "pH" or 'sinensis' in "Alligator sinensis."
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".
Ec