Editing Proper noun (section)

=== History of capitalization ===

European alphabetic scripts only developed a distinction between upper case and lower case in medieval times so in the alphabetic scripts of ancient Greek and Latin proper names were not systematically marked. They are marked with modern capitalization, however, in many modern editions of ancient texts.

In past centuries, [[Orthography|orthographic]] practices in English varied widely. Capitalization was much less standardized than today. Documents from the 18th century show some writers capitalizing all nouns, and others capitalizing certain nouns based on varying ideas of their importance in the discussion. Historical documents from the early United States show some examples of this process: the end (but not the beginning) of the [[United States Declaration of Independence#Annotated text of the engrossed declaration|Declaration of Independence]] (1776) and all of the [[United States Constitution|Constitution]] (1787) show nearly all nouns capitalized; the [[United States Bill of Rights#Text of the Bill of Rights|Bill of Rights]] (1789) capitalizes a few common nouns but not most of them; and the [[Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution|Thirteenth Constitutional Amendment]] (1865) capitalizes only proper nouns.

In [[Danish orthography|Danish]], from the 17th century until the orthographic reform of 1948, all nouns were capitalized.<ref>Kjeld Kristensen: Dansk for svenskere, page 133, Gleerups 1986, ISBN 91-38-61407-3</ref>