RE: [office] Lower cases in proper names

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <dennis.hamilton@acm.org>]

Peter, thanks you are right.  I must have clicked the wrong "Reply" option.   

-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Junge [mailto:peterjunge@RedOffice.com] 
Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 17:34
To: dennis.hamilton@acm.org
Subject: Re: [office] Lower cases in proper names

Dennis,

thanks for the detailed thoughts about the topic, really valuable for me
as English is my second language.
I have been receiving this message as a private mail, I guess you wanted
to CC the TC to share this information.

Best regards,
Peter

Dennis E. Hamilton wrote:
> I think that we need to be consistent, while also being careful to distinguish between a technical term that has an established spelling and capitalization and a general term that is associated with the work of Boole and Descarte.  
> 
> A style guide would be helpful.  We should then be consistent with that guidance.
> 
> I agree that capitalization is appropriate when the use is one derived from the proper names.  However, this is not a universal custom, especially in language communities where capitalization is not used so heavily.  Derived adjectives are often not capitalized, as is often the case for boolean and cartesian.
> 
>  - Dennis
> 
> MORE THINKING
> 
> Boolean and Cartesian might be appropriate *when* we are not talking about specific values of attributes or use in attribute names and element names.  It is a way to honor those contributors.  (I would be surprised to see Gaussian, Newtonian, and Euclidian with lower-case letters, but that would probably happen once computer scientists find a reason to appropriate those terms.)
> 
> In reference to data types, the datatype name may be a specialization with origins in the proper name but the type name is not capitalized by whoever has made the definitive specification of the type (e.g., if we are talking about XSLT or XSD or Java or ...).
> 
> The ambiguity is in expressions like "Boolean values", "Boolean variables" and "Cartesian coordinates".  Also, Boole and Descarte may well not have recognized such an usage themselves.
> 
> 
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Peter Junge [mailto:peterjunge@RedOffice.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, July 21, 2009 01:37
> To: patrick@durusau.net; Michael Brauer - Sun Germany - ham02 - Hamburg
> Cc: OpenDocument Mailing List
> Subject: [office] Lower cases in proper names
> 
> Patrick, Michael,
> 
> I'm currently review ODF 1.2 CD02 rev03, you likely noticed the typo
> issues if have been filing in JIRA. I found expressions, namely
> 'boolean' and 'cartesian', that are IMHO proper names, hence starting
> with an upper case letter. Is my assumption correct? Shall I file an
> issue for it?
> 
> Best regards,
> Peter
> 
> 

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Peter Junge
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