Friendly reminder that all language elements are arbitrary.

[seerofbread]

Earlier today I had a small crisis because I wasn't sure why capslock is considered loud. Capital letters are just grammar, right? They say, "This is the beginning of a sentence," or "This is the name of a specific person/place/etc," and the only other thing I can think of is "This is an acronym," sort of. But nobody shouts the beginning of a sentence or anything like that, so what gives?

I remembered that it is emphasis, though, and maybe it also has something to do with the fact that capital letters take up more space than their lowercase doubles, but yes shouting is emphasis and that's the most logical reason I can come up with for why capslock gets read as shouting all the time.

(Last computer class, we were talking about binary, and the professor asked why we use decimal system. I mean I already think about that, I'm a fan of binary and I'm great at overthinking those things. But everyone else was stumped.)

Comments

[kayzowl]

huh, i never thought about that before. Capital letters also distinguish between common and proper nouns though, which gives them some emphasis, i think? They also tend to be prefaced with a pause, whether it's between sentences or an acronym etc and they're read slower, so i think that also sometimes gives them more weight in terms of the rhythm of a sentence.

[seerofbread]

I'm not completely sure about being prefaced with a pause (except in sentences, and in acronyms that you spell out) though I think I can see why it might seem that way, and it definitely gives emphasis in the use of proper nouns. So I'm pretty sure that reading them as yelling is just a thing about how, verbally, the emphasis might be by increased volume.

So now the question is whether or not there's any equivalent in languages that don't have the same alphabet/grammar rules.