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Say I am writing an article on something like the Riemann integral or morphogenesis. I have two questions regarding capitalization.

  1. Is it allowed to capitalize the first letter of a composite name of importance. E.g.

    "The importance of the Lebesgue Integral cannot be overstated."

I feel like the 'integral' is as much part of the name of the thing as the mathematician Lebesgue it was named after and I would like to emphasise that. And speaking of emphasis:

  1. Can I capitalize the first letter of a word that is the primary subject of a paragraph? Like e.g.

    "..trans-membrane signaling during Morphogenesis.."

It might be because I am german and we capitalize the first letter of nouns in general but I feel like this makes the word more significant and makes the writing more understandable in this way. (Ah, we are talking primarily about morphogenesis and not primarily about membranes.)

lpnorm
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    Sometimes it can be said to be a Good Thing, but there is no need to capitalise every occurrence of 'morphogenesis' just because that's the topic of the article. – Weather Vane Mar 14 '22 at 13:22
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    This has nothing to do with grammar. – Robusto Mar 14 '22 at 13:24
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    Does this answer your question? Is one allowed to use capitalization for emphasis? Also Capitalizing a word mid-sentence and What purpose does capitalization serve in English today?, among others. – FumbleFingers Mar 14 '22 at 13:27
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    Caps that look arbitrary to the reader make the writer look childish. If a term always gets the caps, that's a decent pattern. – Yosef Baskin Mar 14 '22 at 13:27
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    Using caps lock for emphasis seems like an entirely DIFFERENT topic to me. If my question is a duplicate, it is not a duplicate of that. – lpnorm Mar 14 '22 at 14:05
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    A quick look online for even the most likely candidates for capitalising does not support your proposal. The Riemann hypothesis, the Hilbert space, Euler’s number all appear as upper case person, lower case noun in many sites. Capitalising a concept does not emphasise its importance in a sentence, it just looks like a typo. I suspect that as you suggest you are indeed too influenced by the German capitalising conventions. – Anton Mar 14 '22 at 14:12
  • @Anton Yeah I realize it is a convention. But not one I like. And conventions vary widely. I personally think it's a crime to indicate a vector with an arrow on top of a variable but it is something I have to live with when reading engineering literature. The question is whether it is a formal error, not whether it is uncommon. And to me capitalising a concept does add to its 'visual importance'. – lpnorm Mar 14 '22 at 14:53
  • @RobustosupportsUkraine Really? Because in german it would for example be grammatically incorrect not to capitalise the word 'Integral'. Is it pure gusto in english? – lpnorm Mar 14 '22 at 14:56
  • "In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers' or writers' composition of clauses, phrases, and words.". But it isn't done, at least in the morphogenesis example. Look through the journals in your field. – David Mar 14 '22 at 16:02
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    It's not ungrammatical, but style guides often have something to say (example: Guardian under Capitals). So do what you're told. – Stuart F Mar 14 '22 at 19:31
  • In math, most terms are not capitalized by default, except for proper names (as others have noted above). This extends even to titles of papers, where only the first letter in the title of a math paper may be capitalized, except for proper names. I would presume this is because chunked math concepts are already wordy enough, so we forgo capitalization for the sake of ease of writing. – Rob Mar 14 '22 at 21:47
  • German, not german. The latter is not OK in English, although it would be in French. – David Mar 14 '22 at 23:43
  • @RobBland and yet there is a silent consensus among researchers to name theorems and algorithms after their 'inventors' instead of giving them proper names that reflect the core of the concepts. With something short like the Riemann integral that may make sense but with others we make it extra wordy purely for the sake of arrogance like e.g. Broyden–Fletcher–Goldfarb–Shanno algorithm. This is a convention that serves only ego and yet propagates. Not every convention makes sense to preserve. – lpnorm Mar 15 '22 at 10:25

2 Answers2

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What the question is driving at is that something that is ordinarily a common noun may be treated as a proper name (or a part of a proper name) within a particular context. When it is, it is capitalised under the general rule that proper names are capitalised.

In other words, there is no special rule of English language about capitalising important words, but there may be special conventions within particular fields about what terms are to be treated as proper names. Because they are conventions, they depend on general acceptance within the field, and an individual author is taking a risk in trying to change the convention or create a new convention of this sort. If everybody who writes about the Euler’s constant leaves c lowercase, it is unwise for a particular author to start capitalising it; but if the convention had been established to write it as Euler’s Constant, no rule of English language would have been violated.

jsw29
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Grammar

It is ‘grammatically OK’ because capitalization of words is not grammar.

This is clear from the Wikipedia entry for Grammar:

“In linguistics, the grammar of a natural language is its set of structural constraints on speakers‘ or writers’ composition of clauses, phrases, and words.”.

Grammar is, and was, a characteristic of the spoken language, irrespective of whether the speakers are, or were, able to write. It developed before literacy.

Spelling, punctuation and capitalization are important for transmitting what is said, but they are not part of the structure of the language and are not grammar (even in German).

Orthography

Now that the question has become one of orthography, then it seems either to become one of usage — how rare is such usage — or of how people will react if the poster diverges from accepted usage.

Answers to the former can be obtained by reading published articles in the scientific fields in question. As a biological scientist I would say that you are unlikely to encounter the second example. If I wished to distinguish signalling during morphogenesis from that during some other process I would italicize the word, and I from my experience that is accepted practice. Likewise, I would find it strange to see the word capitalized, and think that a sub-editor (they still exist in some journals — I was savaged by one recently) would remove it.

(But you have no way of knowing that I am right, because this part of my answer is completely subjective — something I normally avoid on SE. I only added it because the question was changed and I’d gone to the bother of answering the original.)

David
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    There are other definitions of grammar, with 'grammaticality' and 'acceptability' (within the linguistics domain) synonymous. But it has consistently been explained on ELU that such broader definitions should not be used on ELU. – Edwin Ashworth Mar 14 '22 at 18:52
  • @EdwinAshworth — I am glad to hear that. What is the portmanteau term for spelling, punctuation and capitalization? Is it orthography or what? – David Mar 14 '22 at 19:24
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    Yes, orthography, from the Greek for 'correct writing'. You're right, Punctuation, like spelling or capitalization, is a phenomenon of printing, not language. So it's more akin to spark plugs than natural human language, since orthography is a recent technology, while human language is probly several thousand times older. – John Lawler Mar 14 '22 at 19:58
  • @Mitch — Thank you for alerting me to the change in the question. I have edited my answer now. – David Mar 14 '22 at 23:41