Capitalization in the constitution?
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A few years ago (in "…'such matters as Opinion, not real worth, gives a value to'", 11/20/2016), based on reading Mary Astell's 1694 work A serious proposal to the ladies, for the advancement of their true and greatest interest, I asked:
Why did authors from Astell's time distribute initial capital letters in the apparently erratic way that they did?
And I quoted Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade, Introduction to Late Modern English, 2009:
The use of extra initial capitals, according to Osselton, steadily increased during the first half of the eighteenth century to about 100 per cent around the 1750s after which this practice was drastically reduced and, fifty years later, abandoned completely. The reason for giving up the practice to capitalise all nouns was pressure from writers, who felt that they could not longer make use of capitals to emphasize individual words, as they had been accustomed to do before such idiosyncratic use of capitals was standardised by the printers.
This doesn't really answer the question asked today in an email from Joseph Huang, who links to my 2016 post, and asks: "I saw your blog post about capitalization. I am wondering whether you have studied capitalization in the Constitution."
Joseph continues:
It appears to me most of the nouns, if not all, are capitalized. For example, in the preamble, I only find "defence" is not capitalized, all the other nouns are capitalized.
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, 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."
All the nouns in Art. 1 Sec. 1 are capitalized.
"All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives."
"Vacancies" in Art. 1 Sec. 2 Clause 4 is not capitalized.
"When vacancies happen in the Representation from any State, the Executive Authority thereof shall issue Writs of Election to fill such Vacancies."
The 11th Amendment was passed by Congress on March 4, 1794, and ratified by the states on February 7, 1795. In this amendment, there is a significantly smaller percentage of nouns capitalized. But Judicial (adj), Citizens, Subjects, Foreign (adj) State are still capitalized. So such capitalization means Citizens and State are proper nouns? But what about Judicial and Foreign? Note that law and equity are not capitalized, but they are capitalized in the Constitution (Art. III Sec. 2).
"The Judicial power of the United States shall not be construed to extend to any suit in law or equity, commenced or prosecuted against one of the United States by Citizens of another State, or by Citizens or Subjects of any Foreign State."
This is confusing to me: how the drafters of the Constitution and the amendments decide what to capitalize? Are you aware of any linguistic studies of capitalization in the Constitution and the amendments?
Short answer: No. Maybe some commenters will contribute references to relevant linguistic studies?
But I am aware of some work by legal scholars that makes a relevant point, e.g. Akhil Reed Amar, "Our Forgotten Constitution: A Bicentennial Comment", The Yale Law Journal 1987:
This is a story about the Constitution that begins with some rather shocking facts: The parchment that all of us — practitioners, judges, scholars — have been using for the last century as the definitive copy of the supreme law of the land, is not. The handwritten, handsigned document enshrined in the National Archives and reprinted everywhere was never ratified by "We the People of the United States." Even the Senate is on record as acknowledging that this revered document has virtually no legal significance. No kidding.
Fortunately, the document that was ratified by Americans in the late 1780's — an edition printed in New York several days after the signing of the parchment in Philadelphia — bears a close resemblance to the text we have all grown up with. Although the official printed archetype of the Constitution (whose existence has for many years been a well kept if unintended secret) is marked by different punctuation and capitalization, the words are the same as those in the familiar parchment. Thus, the National Archives version is probably good enough for government work.
In other words, constitutional capitalization was a stochastic sociolinguistic process. It might be revealing to construct a statistical model of capitalization practices in the relevant regions of time and space, but I don't think anyone has done it.
David P said,
July 23, 2024 @ 11:32 am
Alexander Hamilton's "Report on the Subject of Manufactures" has capricious capitalization, including "more and More" and "women and Children." It also has the uncapitalized "women and children." The text can be searched with Cntl-F at https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Hamilton/01-10-02-0001-0007 .
Cervantes said,
July 23, 2024 @ 11:43 am
Perhaps someone will study capitalization in the social media posts of DJ Trump. It may be essentially random.
Y said,
July 23, 2024 @ 12:44 pm
The reason for giving up the practice to capitalise all nouns was pressure from writers, who felt that they could not longer make use of capitals to emphasize individual words
And yet, German persisted and codified the practice. The reason for the difference must be [insert shallow, handwavy, borderline-insulting national stereotypes].
Mike Anderson said,
July 23, 2024 @ 12:58 pm
@Y
There are even are places where English completely disappears!
Well, in America, they haven't used it for years!
— Previn, Deutsch, et. al. "Why Can't The English?"
Leslie Katz said,
July 23, 2024 @ 1:17 pm
In English law, the traditional attitude, since discarded, was that such matters as punctuation and paragraphing weren't to be used as aids to construing legislation. I'm not aware of any English judicial discussion of capitalisation, but I assume that the same attitude would have been taken to it as to punctuation and paragraphing.
Perhaps an originalist approach to construing the US constitution would adopt the now-discarded English approach and reject capitalisation as a constructional aid.
Ralph J Hickok said,
July 23, 2024 @ 1:26 pm
@Mike Anderson
I'm puzzled by your citing "Previn, Deutsch, et. al." Surely Alan Jay Lerner is the author of that quote.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 23, 2024 @ 1:39 pm
FWIW, the convention in American law at present is that, if you see a noun that's not a proper noun in a contract, statute, regulation, ordinance, etc., it's an indication that the capitalized term is elsewhere defined in said contract, statute, regulation, ordinance, etc. For example, a contract clause might read, "The Parties [where "Parties" are defined in the caption] agree that payment for the Work [elsewhere defined in terms of an appended Statement of Work ("SOW")] shall be according to…"
Bybo said,
July 23, 2024 @ 2:35 pm
re: German
I might have grown up 'knowing' that the reason for the capitalisation works in German (and Luxembourgish, and until realtively recently Danish) is the longer use of gothic script ('Fraktur') in German- and Danish-speaking countries. I'm not convinced, but, frankly, I'm not aware of a better explanation.
And, yes, the fact that the capitalisation of nouns in German is not available for nuances of meaning can sometimes be a disadvantage. I've only noticed this in translations from English or in English-influenced usage. My examples are very random, but anyway: 1. translations of novels by Terry Pratchett. 2. contracts drawn up (in German) by a major international law firm. (The law firm ultimately solved it with small caps).
Bybo said,
July 23, 2024 @ 2:42 pm
re: seeming randomness of non-capitalised nouns
German used to have something called 'verblaßte Substantive', ie nouns that weren't capitalised in specific set phrases. Examples: 'im trüben fischen', 'in bezug auf', 'im großen und ganzen'.
Orthography reform did away with this.
I mention this because someone might find it interesting, but it doesn't seem to explain the English examples.
Allen W. Thrasher said,
July 23, 2024 @ 4:00 pm
I can’t find a source at the moment, but I think I read somewhere that for a long time papal documents had no punctuation.
AntC said,
July 23, 2024 @ 4:09 pm
I've certainly experienced the rather vertiginous effect of seeming-random capitalisation — for example in Tristram Shandy (1759) — but there you can't exclude it's deliberately mischievous.
"in order to …" is a fixed phrase (meaning "so as to …"); it's more or less an accident that 'Order' there happens to be a noun; it's not a noun with the same standing as 'Union' — which there is tantamount to 'United' as in 'United States'.
a statistical model of capitalization practices in the relevant regions of time and space
I can see a difficulty that modern editions have regularised capitalisation — much like the red wavy lines I keep getting from the spellchecker here under my BrE -is- rather than -iz-.
Philip Anderson said,
July 23, 2024 @ 5:16 pm
Not only is “defence” not capitalised, it has the British spelling; American spelling was not yet independent!
John Swindle said,
July 24, 2024 @ 3:41 am
@Cervantes: Trump may be using initial capitalization for emphasis. He has a huge fan base, of course, for such a limited performer, and I don't know whether his capitalization choices reflect or influence theirs at all.
Coby said,
July 24, 2024 @ 8:43 am
I am surprised that no one has brought up Donald Trump's rather erratic capitalization in his tweets.
Philip Taylor said,
July 24, 2024 @ 9:03 am
I think that it is not impossible, Coby, that I am not the only reader of Language Log who prefers to remain in complete ignorance of anything whatsoever posted on Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and their ilk.
James Wimberley said,
July 24, 2024 @ 9:34 am
How did the century-long fad for emphasis capitalisation in English arise? Magna Carta in Latin, Chaucer, Tyndale, Shakespeare and the KJV don't go in for it.
Genesis 1.5 is an interesting rare exception.
Tyndale: and [God] called the lyghte daye and the darcknesse nyghte: and so of the evenynge and mornynge was made the fyrst daye.
KJV: And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
God carries on naming with Heaven 1:8 and Earth and Seas in 1:10. In the KJV. God is creating neologisms, though he then gives up on the plants, birds and fishes and leaves the onerous naming job to Adam and Linnaeus in 2:19-20.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
July 24, 2024 @ 10:58 am
Philip Taylor said,
Nope, there's at least one other…
Cervantes said,
July 24, 2024 @ 2:29 pm
Coby — see the second comment in the thread.
CuConnacht said,
July 24, 2024 @ 4:12 pm
The 2024 Republican Party platform, besides being much shorter than such documents usually are, appears to have adopted Donald Trump's erratic capitalization habits. Scroll past the bullet points in ALL CAPS. For example:
Under President Trump, the U.S. became the Number One Producer of Oil and Natural Gas in the World — and we will soon be again by lifting restrictions on American Energy Production and terminating the Socialist Green New Deal. Republicans will unleash Energy Production from all sources, including nuclear, to immediately slash Inflation and power American homes, cars, and factories with reliable, abundant, and affordable Energy.
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
At first I had typed "seems to be mush shorter . . . ." I was tempted to leave it.
David Marjanović said,
July 24, 2024 @ 5:03 pm
German never seems to have had capitalization for emphasis. It seems to have started with just the names of princes and then gradually generalized to all nouns. Adjectives derived from proper names still aren't capitalized.
French did this for a short while, and still does in headlines. German has no separate rules for headlines.
It's clearly not random. It's for emphasis, plus a Very Generous Definition of "Proper Name", as exemplified in the Republican platform that the Trump campaign pushed through – I bet Trump capitalized it personally, as he reportedly does with his social-media posts even when aides write them.
That's after the spelling update of 1709. Is the original of 1611 identical here?
Philip Taylor said,
July 25, 2024 @ 4:47 am
Just checking now, David, but the PDF facsimile is 1,8GB, so will take some time to download …
Philip Taylor said,
July 25, 2024 @ 5:44 am
Download now complete. And yes, capitalised in the 1611 edition — "5 And God call the light, Day, and the darkness he called Night: ${}^{†}$ and the evening and the morning were the first day." — note an additional comma before "Day" and a colon, not a period, after "Night".
David Marjanović said,
July 25, 2024 @ 8:02 am
Thank you!
Philip Taylor said,
July 25, 2024 @ 8:18 am
A pleasure, David. And of course "5 And God call the light, Day," should have read "5 And God called the light, Day,"
John Swindle said,
July 25, 2024 @ 11:31 pm
The word "Day" in "And God called the light, Day" is somewhat like a proper noun. If it had said "And God called the light Mary Ellen" we'd have no doubt about the matter.
CuConnacht said,
July 26, 2024 @ 4:52 pm
To emphasize a word in German you add s p a c e s. Swedish must do that too; I remember seeing it in the English subtitles to Smiles of a Summer Night.
John Swindle said,
July 27, 2024 @ 1:11 am
@CuConnact: That's pretty cool. In my humble opinion.
John Swindle said,
July 27, 2024 @ 1:11 am
Of course my misspelling your name isn't cool. Sorry.
Philip Taylor said,
July 27, 2024 @ 2:31 am
CuConnacht — "To emphasize a word in German you add s p a c e s" — OMG. Does this mean that German typesetters spend their leisure hours shagging sheep ?! [1]
[1] https://www.paulshawletterdesign.com/2017/01/typophillics-no-1/
David Marjanović said,
July 28, 2024 @ 8:08 am
That's pretty old-fashioned. It comes from Fraktur not doing italics; hardly anyone knows how to do it on a computer (with non-breaking spaces), and Kids Today may never have seen it if they aren't unusually well read. I think I last saw it in a linguistic PhD thesis from 2007 that contains several typographic innovations and distinguishes spaced-out* words for emphasis from italics for presentation of attested or reconstructed words/morphemes/whatever.
* gesperrt, literally "locked", for, presumably, some reason
Philip Taylor said,
July 28, 2024 @ 10:03 am
I think, David, given the enormous number of TeX users worldwide, the more linguistically-aware of whom will almost certainly by now be using XeTeX, your assertion that "hardly anyone knows how to do [letter-spacing of Fraktur] on a computer (with non-breaking spaces)" does not stand up to scrutiny. Even including the few minutes to locate and download a suitable font, the following took me less than 15 minutes in total —
Bybo said,
July 28, 2024 @ 11:00 am
DM is of course right. Sperren did linger on in Antiqua typesetting (I have some books from the 1950s and 1960s that do it – presumably because those where the same typesetters at work who where at least aware of, if not more used to Fraktur typesetting), but it's not common today. At all.
And besides just the TeXnical details you should also know how to do it correctly. For example, ch, ck are not spaced (the ligature glyphs are kept intact). Except, of course, where they aren't ligatures, as in Slavic names on -cki.
Milan said,
July 29, 2024 @ 9:48 pm
@Bybo
While it would be very uncommon for a new book to use Sperren, it is commonly reproduced in new editions of older text, at least in philosophy. Scholarly editions of, say, Kant, Hegel and Heidegger use Sperren where the original editions did. It's distinguished from italics, which is also reproduced based on the original editions, where it is used for loanwords. This is done even though the spelling is typically brought in line with modern orthography!
Bybo said,
July 30, 2024 @ 5:54 am
@Milan
Indeed! The Meiner editions do that IIRC.
Andreas Johansson said,
July 31, 2024 @ 7:16 am
In Swedish, Sperren (Sw. spärrning) is basically obsolete. I've only seen it very old (like ca 1900) books, and in discussions of historical typography.