Re: Case sensitivity (was Re: no title)

[Leif Roar Moldskred <lrm@provida.no>]

Hyman Rosen <hyrosen@mail.com> writes:

> Leif Roar Moldskred wrote:
> > Have you never encountered conventions such as this:
> > SMITH, JOHN - English explorer and principal founder of the first
> > permanent English settlement in North America at JAMESTOWN (q.v.)
> 
> Certainly, demonstrating exactly what I said. In this context,
> upper case tells me that the words are index terms, for which
> more information is available.

Preciesly - you get that from the _context_ and not from the
language. The meaning of the text doesn't change because of the
case. If English had been case sensitive, one could not have used case
to denote index terms, emphasis, person's names, chapter headings or
other similar uses - because the case would have been fixed by the
meaning.

You might as well argue that since the use of Hungarian notation in C
provides you with information about the varible, C is "Hungarian
notation sensitive." I maintain that the use of case in written
English is only a convention, and is not part of the language
itself. THIS IS ENGLISH TOO, after all.

> 
> > Regarding your letter of 20th March, I must express my TOTAL
> > disagreement with ...
> 
> And here too. What are you trying to show? I said that the
> reader will use case to assign alternate meanings to words.
> Here case is used for emphasis.

But the meaning of the word doesn't change, and the meaning of the
sentence doesn't change. Case is used merely as an aid in how to read
the sentence, it has no semantic meaning. Case in point, you could
equally well write the sentence above as "Regarding your letter of
20th March, I must express my _total_ disagreement with ..." 

> 
> > And, of course, since English is not just a written language, but also
> > a spoken one, English quite simply _can not_ be case sensitive.
> 
> This might be a better argument if English did not have homonyms!
>      "He read the red book."
>      "Don't underestimate the might of the mite."

I don't think the existence of homonyms invalidates the argument, but
on second thought I would say that the existence of spelling does - so
I'll withdraw it.

-- 
Leif Roar Moldskred