grammar
 

Why does Asian or American or Latino need to be capitalized but not human?

Because Asia, America, and Latin America are places, and Huma is not ;) if we referred to ourselves as such, we would capitalize Earther or Earthling.

More specifically, Asian, American, and Latino are proper nouns; human is a common noun.

It is the same difference with America and country.

Not really answering my question as Latino is not a place. It's referring to their Latin based language, not an area of living. Nor is African-American (they're places separately but together its a "race").

Or how about, even though its not PC, Indians? The native Americans I mean. And shoot is it, Native, or native...?

Or Muslims, Jews? Those are not places you can go to on a map. They're associations by belief.

So *why* is one proper and one common? They're all referring to groups of people. I'm not seeing a difference.

so are you asking what the distinction is between proper and commom nouns, or why these particular proper nouns are classified as they are?

Mostly the latter, but I wouldn't mind hearing the former too.

Proper vs. common:


Canada/country
Canadian/human
Starbucks/coffee shop
The Da Vinci Code/book
New York Times/newspaper
Venus/planet (or goddess)
God/diety

Capitalize the noun if it has a specific identity (e.g. it's Starbucks, not Tim Hortons...get your coffee shops right....or: my country is Canada, not America)

Common nouns have no specific or unique identity, as in they are a "common" thing of many varieties.

I guess it just gets muddied when race comes into play, perhaps because there really is no such thing. But I guess they had to decide if races should be capitalized or not. Because Latino is referring to a whole bunch of people, not one specific thing. So it just doesn't make sense in my eyes. Because you could also use your same argument in, human, not monkey, or human, not ape. Human is just as unique/specific as any of those other things (IMO).

Yes, but "human" isn't referring to something unique. "Christoper Lee," on the other hand, is.

I understand the confusion. "Latino" refers to a group...but it refers to a group with a unique set of characteristics. (In this case, it is considered a proper and collective noun.)

humans (common)...Latinos (proper) (both collective nouns, but the former is a common noun, while the latter is a collective noun)

humans: no unique characteristic identified (a bunch of people of any kind)
Latinos: unique characteristics identified (people of Latin-American or Spanish-speaking descent)

I am human, but I am not Latino.

OK, so riddle me this. If aliens show up tomorrow then humans will be capitalized? :D Since humans will then be a distinct group of people.

Anyways, I still don't buy that logic. Humans are unique, we're separate from the dead for instance. Zombies are people too damnit!

Okay.... :)

If aliens arrived tomorrow, we'd say things like this:

"The aliens are attacking us!"
"All of them?"
"No, just Zorgargh and his Zortonite armies."

And the aliens would say things like this:

"Zorgargh is attacking the humans!"
"All of them?"
"No, just the Americans."

And the zombies would say things like this:

"Must...eat...human....brains...."
"Have you tried alien brains?"
"Oh, gosh...no, I guess I haven't."
"Well you must; they are absolutely delightful, especially with a dab of Grey Poupon." *holds up a jar*
"Oh...that's mustard."
"Yes, quite right."
"Say, would you capitalize 'mustard' as you would 'Grey Poupon'?"
"No, of course not. 'Grey Poupon' is a proper noun, while 'mustard' is a common noun."
"I see. It's hard to think on an empty stomach."
"Yes, I suppose so. It's been a while since you ate Mr. Whitaker's brains."
"Well, I do recall reading that Zortonite brains are decent."

Um...you're kind of my favorite person ever after that post. :D

Awesome BG :D

So I fully understand the grammatical rules for such, but I still see no real practical reason to distinguish between aforementioned nouns.

Also amusing was looking up the words, people, person, and human. The dictionary uses circular logic to define them.

I swear I'm not trying to make trouble. I've never been able to fully understand our grammar.

How is our grammar compared to other languages in elegance? Like how English is one of the hardest languages to learn. Is our grammar the same? I know spelling and pronunciation is part of the problem, is grammar the other half?

Ohhhh, also, one more silly scenario. Say the aliens come to live with us, we're friends. So they're no longer aliens. They're considered people, but not humans. Is human now capitalized?

And if human still isn't capitalized is there ever a scenario where it would be? I'm trying to use these scenarios to figure out if there's a reason for not capitalizing human or if it's just because some old white dudes in the 1600s said so.

i was going to make something but after baraka's post above, it seems hopeless.

what you seem to be stuck on, zeraph, is that the distinction between proper and common nouns seems to be a matter of a strict rule of some kind, but when you start thinking about it, the appearance of a strict rules gets erased and convention replaces it. this is a matter of convention. english is full of them--it's not a terribly systematic language.


in a way, it's like the lunacy of trying to draw a straight line on land over an extended distance--something like what mason & dixon did. it makes sense on a map, but to trace it on the ground...? it's a very strange thing to do, if you think about it. boundaries look like they result from the application of a rule, but that rule only holds together as a rule if you assume a remove.

Hmmm. I was always taught (maybe wrongly?) that grammar *was* a system of rules, like algebra. Yeah some are complicated and can be an "i before e except after c" kind of contingency, but they were still a hard system of rules. If its not, then that would explain why I've never been able to "get it," getting it under my current perception would be impossible.

I think roachboy's response is the closest you're going to get to an answer here. While there is a set of hard rules that define basic grammar, there are so many exceptions that there's no such thing as a complete English rulebook.

If only I had had baraka as an English teacher in high school, everything would have been so much clearer :lol:

I know, BG has a way of explaining things.

So BG, agree with them? I'm waiting for your final word.

roachboy is correct. Convention will always trump rules. The rules are always changing for this reason.

But I will point out that the conventions I outlined above still stand.

It's my job to keep track of these things.

see, you know stand before the curious tunnel that is trying to determine what a rule is.
wittgenstein pulled on this string to great effect in philosophical investigations. if you're feeling inclined to head down the rabbithole for a while, that's a lovely ride. not easy though--it requires attention. and it messes with your head.

what holds proper nouns together as a class is more what wittgenstein calls a family resemblance than the application of a particular rule.

this is maybe a general hand-waving in the direction of an introduction.


what the good comrade b-g outlined above is a sequence of oppositions that delimits (by showing) the boundary that separates inside/outside for the class "proper noun."

you can grasp the distinction intuitively by looking at the list, which means the resemblance are most powerful when there's a sequence--you can see the regularity, and what you're talking about really with a class like "proper noun" is a resemblance.

but when you go from description to generating--in other words when you abstract a rule from a sequence unified through a family resemblance--you get in to trouble.

does that mean there is no rule?

uh..

no. but does the fact of a rule explain the resemblance?

uh....

no. but proper nouns as a class does seem to hold together....

but maybe the problem follows from a too-narrow interpretation of what a rule is.

how would you bend the notion of a rule to incorporate the production(?) or reproduction (?) of a particular type of similarity? this is how wittgenstein ends up with the notion of family resemblance.

but the underlying question is: so what exactly is a rule?

and it's down the rabbithole.

BG... that was an awesome explanation. There ought to be an award for that...