Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2009

I don't think there was ever a time when it was generally agreed that
all nouns should be capitalised in English. Capitalisation was a
matter of active controversy around the turn of the 18th/19th century.
Some said capitalise all nouns, some said important nouns, and some
said all important words, whether nouns or not, which seems to be the
older practice. There was never any general agreement as to what made
a word important for this purpose. The rule that names start with a
capital seems to be quite a bit older than this.

For the second question, the more relevant question is, when did _all_
letters cease to be written as capitals.

Well, that depends on the medium.  It took a while for the early
typesetters to reconceptualize roman and italic typefaces as upper and
lower cases, and then to develop distinct lower-case-roman and
upper-case-italic designs.  (My reference books are all at home so I
can't provide specifics.)

-GAWollman

Hebrew has no capitalization.  All letters always have the same form,
except that five have a second form used whenever they're the last
letter in the word.  (And I think there are some decorative
conventions followed in handwriting the Bible.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebrew_alphabet

The old Hebrew alphabet has no capitalization or final letters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paleo-Hebrew_alphabet

I hope your "character-based" isn't supposed to apply to Hebrew.  Its
writing system is much more like that of English than like Chinese
characters.

Chinese does now have punctuation, I gather.  Of course it could have
something analogous to capitalization--writing characters bigger or
with a box around them when they refer to proper names, say--but it
doesn't.

--
Jerry Friedman