Majuscules and minuscules

[George Thompson]

For perhaps its first 15 years (1851ff) the NY Times always printed personal names in its news-stories in small caps, unconcerned with the problem that the Proquest OCR would later have in reading small caps.  (Though I just quickly tested Proquest on this, and it did much better that it had a couple of years ago.  When Proquest first offered the digitized NYTimes, its OCR was entirely unable to read small caps or nearly so, so that every search for a proper name drew a blank until about th 1870s.)

GAT

George A. Thompson
Author of A Documentary History of "The African Theatre", Northwestern Univ. Pr., 1998, but nothing much lately.

----- Original Message -----
From: Mark Mandel <Mark.A.Mandel at GMAIL.COM>
Date: Wednesday, November 18, 2009 11:04 pm
Subject: Re: Majuscules and minuscules
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU

> I just remembered another, facepalm! Egyptian hieroglyphics enclosed
> personal names in a cartouche, an outline frame of a particular shape.
> ISTR
> this being a key clue in the decipherment of hieroglyphics. Persons only,
> not other names we would consider proper nouns.
>
> m a m
>
> On Wed, Nov 18, 2009 at 9:53 PM, Joel S. Berson <Berson at att.net> wrote:
>
> > Thanks, Mark, and especially for replying to my facetious
> > questions.  And forgive me for feeble humor below.  It's my way of
> > relieving the tension arising from reading second proofs of a journal
> > article of mine.
> >
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org