Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Writing systems

archived at Wikipedia talk:Naming conventions (writing systems)

Sinhala script has been nominated for a good article reassessment. If you are interested in the discussion, please participate by adding your comments to the reassessment page. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, the good article status may be removed from the article. Onegreatjoke (talk)

I've recently created Bashplemi lake tablet. I thought y'all would be interested. Input welcome. Bondegezou (talk) 11:37, 6 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

Is there a standard for the capitalization of letter names. I see usage in Wikipedia is mixed. I was just at Khakassian Che and was surprised to see that it was capitalized in the article title and some places in the text. I changed the text to lower case, but wanted to check here before I pursue other changes. Thank you, SchreiberBike | [kbd]  22:59, 19 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

I couldn't find anything exactly on that at Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Capital letters. Of course, in English, letter names aren't usually spelled out, and look kind of odd when they are ("ay, bee, cee, aitch, double-you" etc)... AnonMoos (talk) 08:17, 20 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

If I had to conjecture intuitively, in almost every case where a letter name could be written uncapitalized, it would be rather confusing, and unnecessarily so. Remsense  .. 论 08:21, 20 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

It's long been common to capitalize letter names in English for clarity, as Remsense notes. The OED uses lower case, and that's generally what I've seen in more serious literature, but more popular stuff often capitalizes.

For non-English letter names, I've usually seen them lower-case but set in italics as foreign words. — kwami (talk) 08:46, 20 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

I think you're referring to letters which are being mentioned, not used (i.e. A, B, C, D) and not to actual letter names (ay, bee, cee, dee)... AnonMoos (talk) 15:37, 20 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

Both. Though capitalized letter names tend to be from older sources, e.g. 19th century; not so old as for all nouns to be capitalized, but old enough that capitalization was more pervasive than it is now. E.g. Goold Brown 1856: 10 The First Lines of English Grammar:

The names of the letters, as now commonly spoken and written in English, are A, Bee, Cee, Dee, E, Eff, Gee, Aitch, I, Jay, Kay, Ell, Em, En, O, Pee, Kue, Ar, Ess, Tee, U, Vee, Double-u, Ex, Wy, Zee.

[Though it's hard to tell if this is a case of list capitalization, Brown goes on to give capitalized examples in text, such as '[letters] are often used in lieu of [names], ... as, C, for Cee; F, for Eff; ...']

But yes, in more recent sources, letter names tend to be lower case, as in Waite, Prata & Martin 1984: 190 C (Computer Program Language):

Thus first C checks to see if ex and wye are equal. The resulting value of 1 or 0 (true or false) then is compared to the value of zee.

— kwami (talk) 19:55, 20 December 2024 (UTC) [reply ]

There is a requested move discussion at Talk:G-caron#Requested move 31 December 2024 that may be of interest to members of this WikiProject. —usernamekiran (talk) 10:42, 17 January 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

In a lot of articles (Proto-Sinaitic script, History of the alphabet#Semitic alphabet, Egyptian hieroglyphs, Aleph#Origin, Bet (letter)#Origin, Gimel, Dalet, He (letter)#Origins, Waw (letter)#Origin, etc.), the letters of our alphabet are claimed to be derived from hieroglyphs. This, however, is a minority view the contenders of which contradict each other in the details. Therefore an encyclopedia should not represent this as a fact, as we currently do in all these articles. Please join the discussion at Talk:Proto-Sinaitic script#A complete misrepresentation of the history of writing so we can achieve a consensus before changing all these articles. --Daniel Bunčić (de wiki · talk · en contrib.) 14:00, 9 March 2025 (UTC) [reply ]

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