A capital offence against grammar

My eight-year-old son is, in most respects, making excellent progress with his English reading and writing. However, he exhibits one fascinating little quirk; left to his own devices, he tends to want to capitalise all his nouns while writing. This is rather a Puzzle (as he’d put it). We certainly haven’t taught him to do this, and I’m pretty sure his school hasn’t either.

On its own, this little curio probably wouldn’t have seemed worth writing a blog about – but then last week, I was spending an evening with a friend who has been profoundly deaf since early childhood. My grasp of British Sign Language isn’t great, so we tend to communicate most effectively with one another via pen and paper… and guess what? I noticed that he likes to capitalise his Nouns too. He isn’t in the habit of corresponding with my son in writing, so I don’t suppose either of them picked up the habit from the other.

My question, then, is where did they both independently get this idea from? Neither of them is likely to have been influenced by exposure to German (a Language which is of course famed for systematically capitalising all of its Nouns). I’m well aware that a few hundred years ago the capitalisation of nouns used to be fairly common practice in the English language too, but I can’t see how this would be particularly relevant here. In any case, its implementation in historical English appears always to have been rather spotty; my good friend Wikipedia informs me that “documents from the 18th century show some writers capitalising all nouns and others capitalizing certain nouns based on varying ideas of their importance in the discussion”. (Here’s one for trivia fans: did you know that the nouns towards the end of the US Declaration of Independence are capitalised, but the ones at the beginning aren’t?). We do still see something like this in modern-day English, of course: you have only to look at the headlines of most US-based newspapers (see example here). However, the underlying principle in that context is to make the entire headline stand out from the following body text, so All Words (Nouns or Not) are Capitalized, Except for One or Two Little Ones Which Aren’t – and that isn’t what my son’s doing.

The next logical line of enquiry, therefore, was the possibility that there’s something innate about capitalising nouns. I’m just a layman in this area, but I believe that would fall under the heading of a well-established (but hotly-debated) linguistic theory known as universal grammar, which posits that certain linguistic structures naturally appear in all human languages because the human brain fundamentally works a certain way – so (as the theory goes) you don’t have to teach children the ‘grammar rule’ in question; they automatically do it anyway. However, the immediate flaw in this hypothesis (as well as the fact that I don’t see lots of other kids making the same mistake) is that German and obsolete English don’t exactly constitute “all human languages”. Most other languages – well, at least the ones I know well enough to be able to speculate about, anyway – only capitalise their proper nouns, and of course there are plenty of languages and scripts in the world which don’t distinguish between upper and lower case (e.g. Chinese), and in which capitalisation is therefore a meaningless concept. So much for universality, then.

What does that leave us with? As I mentioned above, most languages which can distinguish between upper- and lower-case letters have a system for capitalising proper nouns, e.g. Richard, Chicago, Microsoft – if you can think of any languages that choose not to (even though they could if they felt like it), I’d be fascinated to hear from you. Apparently we capitalise certain nouns, including proper nouns, because doing so demonstrates “uniqueness within an implicit context; that is, it provides a name to an instance of a general type when the instance is unique within an implicit context.” (no prizes for guessing which online encyclopaedia I found that in). For example, you and I might be able to name a large number of prime ministers (perhaps even of various nationalities) in general, but if I were suddenly to write “the Prime Minister” without any further qualification, my British readers in January 2012 would probably infer that I was referring to David Cameron. However, if this blog post was, say, an historical piece about John Curtin (what do you mean, ‘who?’. The Australian prime minister for most of WW2, of course), the implicit context would have changed and so you’d most likely think of him instead.

Does any of this help to explain what might be going through my son’s mind? Or has he, along with my friend, simply extrapolated from a specific, observable English principle (SOME nouns are capitalised) to create an erroneous general one (ALL nouns are capitalised)? And if so, is he unusual in doing so… or is a tendency to over-capitalise a more common error than I’ve noticed thus far?

Are there any linguists out there willing to chip in with their thoughts?