On 8/30/2014 5:38 AM, Gary Willoughby wrote:
>
> ˙ǝƃɐnƃuɐן uʍo ɹıǝɥʇ ǝʇıɹʍ ɹo ʞɐǝds pןnoɥs ʎǝɥʇ ʍoɥ uo ǝןdoǝd ɥsıןƃuƎ
> ʇɔǝɹɹoɔ oʇ ƃuıʎɹʇ sʎɐʍןɐ ǝɹɐ ǝןdoǝd ɥsıןƃuƎ-uou ʇɐɥʇ snoıɹɐןıɥ ʇı puıɟ
> sʎɐʍןɐ I
>

I'm a native English speaker. Uncapitalized "I" makes a writer come across like a common leet-speak obsessed immature script kiddy. I know you're not one though, which makes it all the more puzzling.

Defend it all you want, argue that it doesn't matter...but it still makes yourself look bad. And for what worthwhile benefit?

(I think native speakers tend to gloss such things over because they've already seen it so much they've become accustomed to tuning out anyone writing in such styles.)

It's not my intent to be insulting here, but the level of insistence on deliberately using and defending such a trivial, and self-defeating, rebelling is just...really??

On Sat, 30 Aug 2014 10:44:18 +0000
safety0ff via Digitalmars-d-announce
<digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:

> On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 07:59:16 UTC, Gary Willoughby
> wrote:
> >
> > Stop being such a grammar nazi.
> >
>
> I didn't bring it up because I felt like being pedantic, I
> brought it up as a suggestion to make it more pleasant to read.
>
> Since you've already been labelled as a pedant, perhaps you
> should learn the difference between pedantry and Nazism.

Can we please stop arguing this (and that goes for both sides of this). This
discussion is not in the least bit productive.

There is no question that failing to capitalize the letter i when it's used as
a pronoun is bad English, and there's no way that anyone fluent enough in
English to write an article like this is not going to know that. So, clearly,
he's doing it on purpose.

I agree that bad grammar - especially when it's so blatant like this -
detracts from what's being written, and pointing out that it was a problem was
fine, but continuing to argue about it serves no purpose. Clearly, he knows
that what he's doing is bad grammar, but he's doing it anyway for whatever his
personal reasons are. Arguing about it like this isn't helping. It's just
increasing the level of contention around here.

- Jonathan M Davis

On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 10:49:33 UTC, Mengu wrote:
> i will join you in your fight. i do not use upper case letters when writing both in english and turkish. i find these rules utterly useless as well.

the funny thing is that there are movements that  fight for a revision of written english since it has been frozen for such a long time that the pronunciation is completely out of sync with how it is written, which is a fairly arcane mishmash.

the lack of willingness to reform english creates a lot of unnecessary educational problems all over the world. meaning, people have to memorize pronunciation rather than deduce it from the spelling. i find that rather wasteful...

(you know you've won a debate when people start to focus on your grammar ;-)

On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 11:27:13 UTC, Jonathan M Davis wrote:
> On Sat, 30 Aug 2014 10:44:18 +0000
> safety0ff via Digitalmars-d-announce
> <digitalmars-d-announce@puremagic.com> wrote:
>
>> On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 07:59:16 UTC, Gary Willoughby
>> wrote:
>> >

> There is no question that failing to capitalize the letter i when it's used as
> a pronoun is bad English, and there's no way that anyone fluent

Actually, IIRC (not native English speaker here), it was once told me that the symbol for "I" (first person) is a different one, something like a half of circle, but in print we use "I" for convenience, as it is pronounced the same and it is the most similar too.

But, that teacher of mine, in handwriting, always depicted the "I" like a kind of "]".

On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 11:19:55 UTC, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
> On 8/30/2014 5:38 AM, Gary Willoughby wrote:
>>
>> ˙ǝƃɐnƃuɐן uʍo ɹıǝɥʇ ǝʇıɹʍ ɹo ʞɐǝds pןnoɥs ʎǝɥʇ ʍoɥ uo ǝןdoǝd ɥsıןƃuƎ
>> ʇɔǝɹɹoɔ oʇ ƃuıʎɹʇ sʎɐʍןɐ ǝɹɐ ǝןdoǝd ɥsıןƃuƎ-uou ʇɐɥʇ snoıɹɐןıɥ ʇı puıɟ
>> sʎɐʍןɐ I
>>
>
> I'm a native English speaker. Uncapitalized "I" makes a writer come across like a common leet-speak obsessed immature script kiddy. I know you're not one though, which makes it all the more puzzling.
>
> Defend it all you want, argue that it doesn't matter...but it still makes yourself look bad. And for what worthwhile benefit?
>
> (I think native speakers tend to gloss such things over because they've already seen it so much they've become accustomed to tuning out anyone writing in such styles.)
>
> It's not my intent to be insulting here, but the level of insistence on deliberately using and defending such a trivial, and self-defeating, rebelling is just...really??

While we're on the subject of capitalization styles we find distracting, I find the German Practice of capitalizing every Noun in a Sentence extremely distracting. I remember reading an older version of Gulliver's Travels that was written in this style, and it was quite annoying.

Just a correction:

On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 10:44:20 UTC, safety0ff wrote:
>
> Since you've already been labelled as a pedant, perhaps you should learn the difference between pedantry and Nazism.

I meant:
Since you've already labelled *me*

Anyways.

On Saturday, 30 August 2014 at 12:44:16 UTC, eles wrote:
> Actually, IIRC (not native English speaker here), it was once told me that the symbol for "I" (first person) is a different one, something like a half of circle, but in print we use "I" for convenience, as it is pronounced the same and it is the most similar too.

It came from "ic" ("ik", "ich"), which was reduced to "i" and then capitalized a century later to add weight. The lower case "i" was originally without at dot…

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=I

So basically "i" is no less correct than "I", it is just even more arcane… :-)