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From: Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz>
Newsgroups: sci.lang
Subject: Re: national lowercase day (14 october)
Date: Tue, 15 Oct 2024 19:17:58 +1300
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On 15/10/2024 11:56 a.m., Christian Weisgerber wrote:
> On 2024-10-14, Ross Clark <benlizro@ihug.co.nz> wrote:
> 
>> but bicamerality did not become general in europe until 1300
>> and took some time to more or less stabilize in english
>> you probably noticed in the text quoted yesterday from the time of henry
>> iv, all nouns capitalized (as still in german)
> 
> In the 19th century, there was a fashion in the German linguistic
> literature, I think, to abandon noun capitalization.  Notably the
> _Deutsches Wörterbuch_ (German Dictionary) started by the Brothers
> Grimm stuck to this.
> 

I meant to mention that something like this capitalization practice 
persisted in English at least until late in the 18th century. I noticed 
it when reading narratives of voyages to the Pacific at that period. 
More particularly, it shows up in (carefully transcribed) journals of 
voyagers such as Cook. An example from George Robertson at Tahiti, 1767:
----------------------
All the way that we ran allong shore we saw the whole coast full of 
Canoes, and the country had the most Beautiful appearance its possible 
to Imagin from the shore side one two and three miles Back their is a 
fine Leavel country that appears to be all laid out in plantations, and 
the regular built Houses seems to be without number, all along the 
Coast, they appeard lyke long Farmers Barns and seemd to be all very 
neatly thatched, with great Numbers of Cocoa Nut Trees....
----------------

This looks roughly like capitalization of lexical words for emphasis, 
rather than on any grammatical basis.

By contrast the published accounts, even when based on journals, seem to 
have completely modern usage of capitals.