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Date: Wed, 17 Oct 2001 16:48:51 +0100
From: Philip Anderson <phil.anderson@amsjv.com>
Organization: Alenia Marconi Systems ISD
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Subject: Re: Caselessness...
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Ted Dennison wrote:
> 
> In article <rc8z7.5446$SU2.573487@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>, David Brown
> says...
> >
> >AFIK, the English language only has one pair of words that can be
> >distinguished by case: August (the month), and august (marked by
> >majestic dignity or grandeur).  Since one is a noun, and the other is an
> >adjective, I would have a hard time seeing them used in a conflicting
> >way.  The adjective variant is not used frequently in English anyway.

August company assembles?

March triumph?


But there are plenty of syntactic and semantic ambiguities which can't
be solved by capitalisation, eg "flying planes can be dangerous".


> If you throw in acronyms, there are oodles of them. For instance, mad (angry or
> insane) and MAD (the defensive philosophy of mutually-assured destruction,
> perhaps also insane but often effective). Of course the relevant example here is
> ADA (acronym for American Dental Association, Americans with Disabilities Act,
> and many many more) and Ada (the name of many people, a city in Oklahoma, and
> the world's best programming language).

So writing ADA (or Ada) is still ambiguous.  That's the way English (and
every other language) is, there is always some ambiguity to be solved by
context (and redundancy).


-- 
hwyl/cheers,
Philip Anderson
Alenia Marconi Systems
Cwmbr�n, Cymru/Wales