Editing Romance languages (section)

=== Upper and lowercase ===
Most languages are written with a mixture of two distinct but phonetically identical variants or "[[letter case|cases]]" of the alphabet: [[letter case#Majuscule|majuscule]] ("uppercase" or "capital letters"), derived from Roman stone-carved letter shapes, and [[letter case#Minuscule|minuscule]] ("lowercase"), derived from [[Carolingian minuscule|Carolingian writing]] and Medieval [[quill pen]] handwriting which were later adapted by printers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

In particular, all Romance languages capitalize (use uppercase for the first letter of) the following words: the first word of each complete [[sentence (linguistics)|sentence]], most words in names of people, places, and organizations, and most words in titles of books. The Romance languages do not follow the German practice of capitalizing all nouns including common ones. Unlike English, the names of months, days of the weeks, and derivatives of proper nouns are usually not capitalized: thus, in Italian one capitalizes ''Francia'' ("France") and ''Francesco'' ("Francis"), but not ''francese'' ("French") or ''francescano'' ("Franciscan"). However, each language has some exceptions to this general rule.