[sw-l] Underlining Proper Name-Signs

[Valerie Sutton]

SignWriting List
June 4, 2005

Ingvild Roald in Norway wrote:
> Actually, even if I've never tried the 'underline' for proper
> names, I think some sort of marker is a good idea. We may go all
> the way back to the Egytian 'cartouche' for Faraos' names, and even
> today all (most?) languages that use the Latin alphabet, will use a
> capital for a proper name. True, some will use it for more that the
> proper names, like for all nouns (German?) or for derivates of the
> proper name (English), but at least this use of a typographical
> marker makes the proper name stand out, and you may, as Stefan
> says, be excused if you do not know that proper name right away. So
> some sort of symbol could be used.

Hello Ingvild and Everyone!
Thank you for this message. Yes, it has been agreed, after a great
many messages, that having a way to capitalize signs is an important
punctuation feature that should be available to all who want to use
it...and underlining in horizontal writing is the standard way to
capitalize a sign...so go right ahead and use it, Ingvild, and I want
to thank everyone once again for this input.

A side note, related to capitalization in spoken languages that use
the Roman Alphabet -

Back when I was 19 years old, I moved to Denmark, and there I learned
to speak some Danish. When it came time for me to write Danish in
email messages, years later, I found out that I put too many capital
letters in my written Danish...those Danes (or is it danes?) who were
writing to me, used fewer capital letters than I did...For example,
they did not capitalize the name of the language danish...so I
realized that i did not know the capitalization rules in Danish.

What are they in Norwegian, Ingvild? Do you use capital letters like
we do in English?...I assume you do not...but I do not know the rules
myself....

And funny, in the computer world, even in English, people are not
using capital letters as much...the younger generation is dropping
all capitals when they write to me in English (they would type
english)....and when they write to me to ask for a packet of
information in the mail, they type their full name and address with
no capital letters at all...smile...computers have their own
capitalization culture I guess!

So the real point here, is that some people will choose to capitalize
and some will not, but at least, if there is a way to do that in
SignWriting, they can choose to do it if they wish...and it may
become connected to which schools the signer has attended as to
whether they capitalize a written sign or not...

Val ;-)