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uncapitalised car marques (fiat, buick, honda)???

posts: 7

Polonius3Threads: 1,005 Posts: 4,834 Joined: Apr 11, 08 ♂	Mar 5, 11, 16:16 #1
I know the rules that religious orders (dominikanie), town-dwellers (paryżanie), months, days and car marques (toyota, audi, dodge) are not supposed to be written in upper case in Polish, but personally I find this a bit disconcerting and visually awkward re motorcars. I always seem to want to type 'Przyjechał Cadillacem, a odjechał Jeepem'. Anyone else have a problem with this?

TlumThreads: 17 Posts: 136 Joined: Feb 20, 07 ♂	Edited by: Tlum Mar 6, 11, 06:32 #2
Indeed, it's more natural to name car marks starting with a capital letter..

♂

Jun 1, 11, 20:10 #3

I've never heard a rule that car makes have to be written with a lower case letter. As a matter of fact, it would be unnatural to me to write "To jest toyota mojego brata" or "Kupiłem wczoraj nowe audi". I think the problem is that these are not proper nouns, inasmuch as they come from names of companies producing cars. It's a similar case as with the words Coke or Velcro in English - they come from names of products of certain companies but were incorporated into common language to refer generically to objects of their type and no longer exclusively to a specific product. Now this where Polish and English diverge - the former will use lower case and the latter will capitalise. But if you consider another examples given by Polonius, you can draw a conclusion that there is much tendency to capitalise in English and quite the opposite is true for Polish.

♂

Jun 4, 11, 12:28 #4

In fact, according to Polish orthographic norms, not only car makes but also city dwellers (paryżanin, berlińczyk), religious orders (franciszkanin), months (czerwiec), days of week (sobota) and many other things that may seem strange to Anglos are in lower case. Or maybe it's the other way round and it’s English that’s got a capitalisation obsession. But it's not as bad as German where every noun (mother, dog, house, sh*t) has to be in upper case!

alexw68	Jun 4, 11, 13:39 #5
Polonius3: But it's not as bad as German where every noun (mother, dog, house, sh*t) has to be in upper case! Same used to be true of English in the 17th/18th centuries. Not exactly sure when the practice died out.

cinekThreads: 1 Posts: 264 Joined: Nov 16, 07 ♂	Jun 5, 11, 14:52 #6
Polonius3: But it's not as bad as German where every noun (mother, dog, house, sh*t) has to be in upper case! I wouldn't day it's bad. You don't need to remember when to use capitals because you always do. Cinek

Polonius3Threads: 1,005 Posts: 4,834 Joined: Apr 11, 08 ♂	Jun 5, 11, 15:19 #7
I'll keep that in mind next time I need to write 'Scheiß'!

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