Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

Not so in French. The simple imperative is still an option, but in place of a gerund an infinitive is often used for interdictions: Défense de fumer. The most obvious difference, however, is that the French public imperative includes a hortatory first-person singular. “Hortatory,” from the Latin hortari “to urge, incite,” refers to a grammatical mood used to encourage (or exhort, which shares an etymology with “hortatory”) someone to do something. In Latin, for example, there’s a hortatory subjunctive; in English, we use let’s for this purpose, i.e. Let’s go to the movies. In French, they use the first-person pronoun je and an appropriately conjugated verb, identical in form to the normal indicative mood. Parisian buses, for example, instruct you how to pay with signs that say Je monte, je valide (“I board, I validate [my ticket]“). In English this sounds condescending; we might teach a child using example sentences about ourselves (“See? I put the blocks back on the shelf when I’m done with them!”) but we’d never speak to an adult that way. But in French there’s no connotation of condescension.

This poster, which I saw in Paris last month, was put up by the Union des Étudiants Communistes to encourage students to sign a petition to nationalize student housing. The key phrase in the poster is Je signe la pétition ! (“I sign the petition!”), which, again, sounds oddly imbecilic to Anglophone ears. Instead we’d just use the imperative: Sign the petition!

This somewhat dilapidated poster urges people to vote for the Front de Gauche (Left Front) in the March 2010 regional elections. Je vote, it says, as opposed to the Vote! you’d more likely find in Anglo-America.

It’s not just the left that uses the hortatory je; this poster from the Catholic church urges readers to donate by saying En 2011, je donne pour l’eglise ! (“In 2011, I give for the church!”). In English I imagine it would use the imperative and say please: Please give for the church in 2011!

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

Iceland and the World

Iceland was discovered in the ninth century CE and settled in about 871, ending its status as the last large uninhabited island on Earth. The initial settlers were Vikings from what are today Norway and the northern Scottish islands, along with their largely Celtic slaves; Icelanders today don’t particularly look like the blond Nordic archetype thanks to this infusion of Britannic blood. In fact, there’s a joke among modern Icelanders: why are British people so unattractive? Because we took all the pretty ones as slaves.

Iceland claims it has the world’s oldest parliament, the Alþingi (which shares pronunciation and etymology with English all-thingy). It was founded in 930 CE, but it hasn’t existed continuously since then, which makes this claim a bit murky; if we’re going to count interrupted parliaments like that, perhaps the Italian Senate should win out as the arguable inheritor of the ancient Roman Senate. The Alþingi, more or less a committee of the island’s most powerful men, was Iceland’s form of government for a few hundred years, but the Kings of Norway were always hovering nearby.

Iceland’s international history consists mostly of a series of intrusions to which it grudgingly acquiesced. In 1000, King Olaf I of Norway basically forced the Alþingi to adopt Christianity. In 1262, after several decades of inter-clan warfare, the Icelandic chieftains agreed to be ruled by Norway, and after some dynastic maneuvering the island ended up in the hands of the King of Denmark from 1380 on. The fervently Lutheran Christian III of Denmark imposed the Reformation on Iceland in the 16th century, and the country today remains overwhelmingly Lutheran (although, being Scandinavian, not especially religious).

Backwardness

Perhaps the clearest theme in Icelandic history is backwardness. Perhaps appropriately for the last large island in the world to be settled, Iceland seemed to lag hundreds of years behind the rest of the world at times.

Until the nineteenth century, Iceland didn’t have a single city. The only industry in Iceland was farming. You would think fishing would also be a lucrative enterprise for an island nation, and they did fish, some, although fish is a surprisingly small part of Icelandic cuisine. But even as fish prices shot up during the Middle Ages, when more and more of increasingly Catholic Europe was forbidden to eat meat on Fridays, no one in Iceland made a living from fishing alone. This was partly because of the restrictive trading system imposed by Denmark, which basically gave individual Danish traders monopolies over buying and selling from individual Icelandic villages. This system not only distorted prices, it also prevented the formation of market villages, which helps explain why Iceland didn’t have any cities.

When the trading monopolies were abolished in 1786, a few trading villages were formed. One of them was Reykjavik, which coincidentally was on the site of the Vikings’ first settlement in Iceland. In 1801, its population was about 600. In 1860, it was at 1,450—approximately one tenth the size of contemporary Peoria, Illinois—but it had already been the largest municipality in Iceland for some time, and in the 1840s it became the site of the reestablished Alþingi.

Electricity and running water both arrived late; Reykjavik was dependent on local wells until 1909, when the first water utility brought piped-in drinking water. Although Iceland has no shortage of rocks, for some reason stone wasn’t used much as a building material until the 19th century, shortly before they switched to concrete.

Another reason Iceland seems so comically backwards to American eyes is the language. Icelandic is the most conservative Germanic languages, and it’s changed very little from Old Norse. For example, here’s a famous verse from Egils Saga, said to have been composed by warlord-poet Egill Skallagrímsson in the early 10th century:

Þat mælti mín móðir,

at mér skyldi kaupa

fley ok fagrar árar,

fara á brott með víkingum,

standa upp í stafni,

stýra dýrum knerri,

halda svá til hafnar,

höggva mann ok annan.

Here, for comparison, is what that verse would look like in Old English:

Þat mælede mín módor,

Þæt me scolde ceapian

flæge and fægra ára,

farran aweg wið wícingum,

standan úppe in stefnan,

stíeran deorne cnear,

faran swá tó hæfene

héawan man and óðer.

You can see the similarities between Old English and Old Icelandic; in fact, the two were still mutually intelligible when the verse was written. But we modern Anglophones can’t make head or tail of either version, whereas a modern Icelander would have no trouble reading the Old Icelandic original. (For an English translation, see here.) The only words in the Old Icelandic that are uncommon in modern Icelandic usage are fley and knörr, both types of ships, according to an excellent archaeological museum in Reykjavik. By contrast, there are about that many words in the Old English translation that we can understand.

The fact that Icelandic looks so much like the Old English we’re vaguely familiar with from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales makes the modern language seem much more archaic to us than it would to, for example, an Italian. (In the history of English, there’s a strong correlation between the passage of time and the de-Germanification of the language, so it’s generally easy for us to see heavily Germanic language as old language.) Then there’s the fact that Icelandic has been very resistant to importing foreign words for neologisms. For example, just about every capital city in the world has a national museum. In Sarajevo, it’s the Zemaljski Muzej; in Budapest, it’s the Nemzeti Múzeum; in Tehran, it’s the Mūze-ye Millī-ye; in Riga, it’s the Nacionālais Muzejs; in Ouagadougou, it’s the Musée National; and so on. In Reykjavik, it’s the Þjóðminjasafnið. Similarly, the photography museum in Reykjavik is the Ljósmyndasafn, the university movie theater is the Háskólabíó, and if you want some information you should look for the sign that says upplýsingar. Wandering around Reykjavik, you’d have a very hard time figuring out what was what if it weren’t for the fact that everything’s in English.

Icelandic is also the only extant language to retain two characters from the ancient Germanic futhark runes, thorn (þ) and eth (ð), which make a soft and a hard th sound, respectively. (Incidentally, before the letter thorn died out in English we started writing it as a sort of y-shape, which is where the phrase “ye olde” comes from—that first word is actually just “the.”) All of these linguistic archaisms, together with the fact that people there tend to have names like Ragnar, Guðbergur, and Thor, combine to make Iceland look a bit like a 10th-century landscape at times. Those are all first names, of course, since Icelanders’ last names are actually just patronymics formed from the father’s name suffixed with -sson or -dóttir. In the absence of family names, phone books in Iceland are organized by first name.

Nationalism

If Iceland’s history sometimes seems parodic (how did they not discover building with stone?), the sharpest and best parody comes from the era of romantic nationalism. Like most nationalisms, Iceland’s has a central figure, a hero in the mold of Simón Bolívar, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Lajos Kossuth, José Rizal, etc. The statue in front of the Alþingi in Reykjavik’s central square belongs to a nebbishy figure named Jón Sigurðsson, who lived in the late 19th century and accomplished very little.

Born in a small town in Iceland in 1811, Jón moved to Copenhagen in 1833 to attend university (there being no universities in Iceland at the time, and only a single college preparatory school). Unusually for a national hero, but not unusually for an Icelander of the time, he remained away from his homeland in the metropolis for the rest of his life (although he never graduated). Imagine George Washington spending his life in London, or Garibaldi in Vienna, or Bolívar in Madrid. You can’t, of course, because those national heroes were busy liberating their nations. Jón was sometimes known during his lifetime, and more often today in Iceland, as Jón forseti, or President Jón. This is not, as you might guess, because he tried for or achieved the title of President of Iceland; it is because he was the president of the Copenhagen chapter of the Icelandic Literary Society. This should give you some idea of the scope of his ambitions.

Being at the center of a group of Icelandic emigres in Copenhagen, Jón was elected to the Alþingi as soon as it was reconstituted in 1844. Fortunately for him, the Alþingi didn’t have that much to do, so it only met every other summer. He was elected president of the Alþingi for a couple periods here and there, although, in my favorite detail from his story, he at one point lost this position and went completely out of favor in Iceland because of his controversial stance on some sort of sheep disease. After this defeat he didn’t return to Iceland for six years.

In 1861, the Danes appointed Jón to a committee studying the possible fiscal separation of Iceland and Denmark. Jón famously produced a document known in Icelandic lore as the “Calculation Claim,” which purported to show that Denmark actually owed Iceland money. The prevailing belief had been that Iceland was basically a money sink for Denmark, which raises the question of why Denmark would care to prevent Iceland’s independence, and why Jón thought it was advantageous to prove that Iceland made money for Denmark. Part of the answer is that Jón didn’t actually want independence, he just wanted autonomy. In fact, when at one point the Alþingi passed a resolution calling for independence, Jón opposed it. Overall he seems like a rather arbitrary choice for a national hero, but I suppose there were no better-qualified candidates.

Today

The Danes, being basically nice folks, unilaterally gave Iceland a constitution in 1874, in honor of its 1000-year anniversary, and made it a sovereign nation also ruled by the King of Denmark in 1918. In April 1940, Nazi Germany occupied Denmark. A month later, the United Kingdom occupied Iceland, passing it over to the U.S. two months later to use as a base. The 40,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iceland during the war outnumbered the island’s adult male population. In a 1944 referendum, Iceland declared itself a republic independent of the King of Denmark, who sent a congratulatory telegram.

The U.S. military presence lasted well beyond World War II and into the Cold War, and it left its mark on Iceland. The international airport at Keflavík was formerly a U.S. base, which explains why you need to traverse over 30 miles of beautiful empty Icelandic countryside to get between it and Reykjavik. In addition to the countryside, you also pass through several miles of American-style suburbs and highways; Iceland has the second-highest rate of car ownership in the world, after Luxembourg. Everyone in Reykjavik speaks good English. In preparation for my visit I’d gotten a Teach Yourself Icelandic book, but the hours I spent studying it failed to pay any practical dividends. The only sentence I spoke in Icelandic was “Talarþu enski?” (“Do you speak English?”), and the few times I broke it out people stared at me like I was crazy. “Enski? Já, já…” said one security guard at the Alþingi, as if I’d asked whether the sky was blue.

Reykjavik is tourist-friendly in other ways as well. It seems to be a running joke there that Icelanders are always asking tourists, “How are you liking Iceland?” Souvenir stores sell T-shirts that say “I’m liking it!”, as well as shirts that say “Ég tala ekki íslensku” (“I do not speak Icelandic”). Every coffee shop and cafe seems to have free, functional wireless internet. Perhaps most convenient of all, Reykjavik has almost completely transitioned to a cashless economy. There’s no need to exchange or withdraw any krónur, since basically every purchase can be made with a credit card. Backwards no more, you might say.

Iceland’s famous geothermal pools are also surprisingly accessible; they’re scattered all over the place, and the non-touristy ones at least are far from expensive. Icelanders use the pools much like Euro-Americans, and especially Britons, use bars and pubs: as a third place, a social venue in which to unwind and hang out. My Icelandic host said he goes 4 or 5 times a week. Pools are more family-friendly than bars, of course, and spending an evening there is a lot cheaper and more pleasant than drinking at a bar. The pool itself, or at least the one I visited, is filled with nothing but pure warm water issuing out of the ground; there are no chemicals, so everyone has to shower down naked beforehand to remove dirt. The pool isn’t hot, just warm, and on a cold October evening I wished it was warmer, but there were hot tubs nearby at three different temperature ranges as well as a sauna.

The decades of American influence on Iceland seem to have had all sorts of subtle effects, and they may help explain why there are disproportionately many internationally famous Icelanders. Icelandic bands often sing in English, and their good reputation in music-literate circles in America might be because they follow the American model of indie music in some way that mainland European bands, for example, don’t. It does seem to be upon music, first and foremost, and secondarily other cultural fields, that Icelanders have built their international reputation. The Icelanders I think are best known by American aficionados of high culture are, in order, Björk, the band Sigur Rós, the Nobel Prize-winning author Halldór Laxness, and the architect Olafur Eliasson (born in Copenhagen to Icelandic parents). (One could also count Leif Ericson, the explorer, who was probably from Iceland.) Not too many, but Iceland has a population of a little over 300,000, slightly larger than Newark, New Jersey and Riverside, California. For comparison, Albania has 10 times as many people, and Colombia more than 100 times as many, but I doubt even those American aficionados of high culture could name more than one or two people from either.

It seems somehow fitting, despite its centuries of backwardness and decades of American influence, that Iceland is among the world’s most progressive country. It elected a divorced single mother as the world’s first democratically elected female head of state in 1980, and the world’s first openly lesbian head of government in 2009. Gays and lesbians could get civil unions from 1996 and married from 2010. It routinely ranks among the top two or three countries in the world for a variety of measures of political freedom. Perhaps with such a small population, it had little inertia tying it to the rural, semi-medieval life that dominated the country only a century ago, and it’s had an easier time dragging itself forward into modernity. Regardless, it’s certainly worth a visit.

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

Heston plays Detective Thorn, a tough-guy cop who doesn’t always play by the rules but does right when it counts. Thorn lives and works in the New York City of 2022, home to 40 million packed-in souls (compared to 2010′s 8.1 million); according to an early line, there are 20 million unemployed people in Manhattan alone, although perhaps this should be dismissed as exaggeration. It is strongly suggested that the outer boroughs of the city now touch the Philadelphia city line somehow, presumably in New Jersey. The broader world, which we never see, is severely overpopulated and overpolluted, with dying oceans and fortress-like farms that can’t produce enough food for the teeming masses. Because of the greenhouse effect (whose inclusion demonstrates amazing prescience, given that the term “global warming” wasn’t even coined until 1975), the earth has become uncomfortably hot year-round, and the air in all exterior daytime scenes has a strong greenish haze.

The film takes part in the anti-urbanism of its day, which also produced such city-as-hell thrillers as Escape from New York (1981, set in 1997) and RoboCop (1987, set in “the near future”). Even as cities emptied out in the era of suburban sprawl (New York lost almost a million residents between 1950 and 1980), in the popular imagination they remained the site of overcrowded tenements and cheek-by-jowl poverty—and no place more than New York, the most urban of American cities. As science fiction tends to do, the film takes this contemporary fear of packed-in run-down apartments and exaggerates it into a claustrophobic city-world. Every time Thorn enters or leaves his apartment, there’s a scene of him half-stumbling up or down a staircase literally full of sleeping bodies. Every exterior daytime shot is full of people, desperate dirty people milling about, waiting in line, scrounging, sometimes rioting. When the detective visits the opulent apartment of the murdered rich man whose death sets off the events of the movie, the wide open rooms with their quiet emptiness seem almost as luxurious to the viewer as to Thorn.

But there are too many of these reprieves in the movie, and they lessen the impact of the dispiriting crowds.The staircase in Thorn’s apartment building is full of sleeping bodies because there’s a curfew at night and they can’t be out on the streets, but a large part of the movie consists of Thorn wandering through these empty streets. Another large part takes place in luxurious indoor spaces like the dead man’s apartment, but their quiet undercrowding would come as more of a relief to the viewer if the noisy overcrowding scenes were more relentless. It’s a shame, because the images of humanity filling every available space seem vital to the film’s central idea: humanity as abject victim of its own shortsighted excesses.

While the New York of 2022 may be overfull of people, it’s lacking in every resource and comfort imaginable: housing, meat, vegetables, eggs, strawberries, air conditioning, incinerators, clean water, soap, books, watches, trees. These are available only to the rich, for whom they’re generally plentiful. In one scene, Thorn attempts to fix his lieutenant’s watch for the umpteenth time; he tries for a bit and gives up, concluding that it’s really broken this time. It would be laughable to suggest buying a new watch. You fix what you have until it can’t be made to work even a little bit, and then you just don’t have it any more. You make do with a trickle of water to wash your hands after a meal of tasteless soylent crackers. You sweat all the time in the constant heat and shower only rarely, briefly, with no hot water. This is the ultimate vision of scarcity, and the viewer’s cultural competence will allow him or her to fill in the irony: that it was all caused by the heedless waste of our 20th century.

But the scarcity, as thematically important as the constant crowding, is also as insufficiently imagined. When Thorn steps into the bathroom in the dead rich man’s apartment and turns on the tap, his joy at the freely flowing fresh water is palpable. He splashes his face once. But he lets the water run for much longer than he needs to, as though there weren’t a voice inside him crying out to shut off the precious resource as soon as he’d finished with it. Late in the movie, Thorn’s aged companion sets out for a mysterious facility called Home. When he arrives, a smiling woman holds the door open for him, and he luxuriates in the cool air that escapes the air-conditioned building—it’s been years, no doubt, since he last felt air conditioning. But instead of walking inside to let the door shut, he stands outside for several seconds in the cool wash of air escaping, then steps in with no apparent sense of urgency. It sounds like nitpicking to begrudge the movie a few seconds of running water here, a few seconds of cool air there. But no one who’s experienced the sort of deprivation that makes up everyday life in Soylent Green could evince such nonchalance at the waste of a precious resource. It would be like a famine victim leaving food untouched at a meal.

In the four decades since Soylent Green was released, the environmental movement has established itself in mainstream American life and psychology (though not, unfortunately, in American politics). A generation has been raised with the ideas of recycling and carbon footprints. Most of us have not yet become the victims of our excess, and the world hasn’t yet been plunged into conditions of extreme scarcity, but I would argue that we’ve already absorbed the virtues of conservation to a much greater extent than anyone involved with the making of Soylent Green. Many of us, at least, feel an urge to turn off the tap when we’re not using it and shut the door when the AC’s on. No one knows whether we’re still destined to wind up in the film’s poor, teeming, broken New York City, but one way to prevent it might be to act as if we’re already there.

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

Deep respect for a thing (/idea/sensation/behavior/attitude/etc.), and distaste for hollow talk in general, can make you wary of naming it, because the more convenient the name, the more easily it can get caught up in hollow talk about it and distracting noise about the thing. But names are handles, they let you work upon the thing, manipulate it: think about it and fit it into its relations with other things. The name facilitates important work, both negative and positive, upon the thing: negative — finding the flaws and incoherencies and disadvantages of the thing when all its consequences and alternatives are considered; positive — understanding yourself, the value of your things, what you can build from them. Perhaps especially for things that are dear to you it is essential to do this in order to expand your world, or else you will stagnate in a constricting world of so few things, neither leaving them aside when they are no longer good for you nor using them to create and reach new things

So go ahead and taxonomize, and circumspectly trust your ability to carry the whole meaning of the thing when you grasp its handle, trust that you can preserve the meaning in your use of the name.

We’re all familiar with the principle behind the conservation of energy, even those of us who know nothing about physics; the basic idea of conservation forms a part of the body of received knowledge we call common sense. The moral equivalent of the conservation of energy could be called the conservation of evil. Unlike its physical analogue, the conservation of evil doesn’t stand up to more than casual scrutiny.

This fallacy boils down to the assumption that the amount of evil in a system stays constant, or, looked at another way, that the amount of evil that comes out of a system is equivalent to the amount that goes into it. Evil on the output end looks like harm to human beings, or whatever else moral bad looks like to you(1). Evil on the input end looks like guilt or moral responsibility.  This fallacy sometimes produces plausible results, as you’d expect from an assumption that’s been incorporated into our intuition. For example, if I try and succeed to kill someone, that produces a result much more evil than if I try and succeed to cause someone discomfort, and it seems fair to say that my moral guilt is proportionately greater.

But in other circumstances it’s easy to see that there is in fact no conservation of evil; for example, lightning could strike and kill someone, causing a very evil output without any evil input, since we can hardly assign moral responsibility to atmospheric conditions. Even with human involvement, there are cases where the conservation of evil leads to obviously false conclusions. If I have a friend of mine over for dinner and make a dish with almonds in it, not knowing that he or she is horribly allergic to almonds, and my friend subsequently dies from eating the meal I’ve made, it’s clear that something tragic has happened—something evil, by the definition we’re using. But I don’t think anyone would argue that my moral culpability is the same as it would be if I’d taken an axe to my friend; I’m not a murderer. Some people might argue that I’m exactly as guilty as I would be if my friend hadn’t been allergic to almonds and nothing at all bad had happened. Others might argue that I’m at least a bit guiltier, for various reasons. But surely no one who gave it much thought would argue that my guilt could be entirely inferred from the system’s output, the death of my friend.

But since no one would actually argue for the abstract validity of the conservation of evil, why bother attacking it? Moral intuition probably steers us right more often than wrong, but it does us good to recognize the systematic ways it can mislead us. A very moving episode of “This American Life” tells the stories of several people plagued by guilt because their actions resulted in evil outcomes, even though it’s widely agreed they bear little if any moral responsibility. It’s a deeply ingrained gut belief in the conservation of evil that keeps these three men feeling guilty against all reason. In lesser ways, this happens to all of us sometimes, when our actions have unexpected or unintended evil consequences. I’m not saying we should feel guilty only for things we intended—moral responsibility is probably not that simple. But it’s also not as simple as the conservation of evil, and we should be wary of our intuition when it suggests otherwise.

(1) I want to be clear that this isn’t about utilitarianism, an abstract moral philosophy that determines an action’s rightness or wrongness by its consequences for human utility. I would define moral intuition as an unconscious collection of heterogeneous mechanisms for producing moral judgments. What I’m talking about here is one of these mechanisms, the conservation of evil, which relies on consequences to produce judgments.

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

The reason we feel threatened with suffocation when reading the Philosophical Investigations is that it seems to point to no “outside”. The Tractatus seemed to have an outside.
Even the fly in the fly-bottle – if he knows he is in the bottle – has an outside, and an outside can be both an object of hope or one of despair.
Hence, perhaps, the “lack of hope” one can feel: it comes from the reader’s metaphysical intuition that change is something coming from the outside to the inside: if there is no outside, no change is possible.
Perhaps – once we are outside the fly-bottle, or imagining ourselves to be – we only feel trapped because we mistake “having no outside” for “our outside being somewhere we can’t get to”.

But think about what we as a species have accomplished over the course of our existence.Plopped down on what appears to be a flat plain and with mouths constantly in need of feeding, various dangers scattered around us, and all sorts of other distractions, we’ve managed to figure out—even before we equipped ourselves with the powerful sense-augmenting and computing machines we rely on today—that we’re living on the surface of one of nine or so round worlds, each tilted on its axis and orbiting a giant fiery ball that weighs about 2 × 10³⁰ kilograms at a distance of about 149.6 million kilometers. We figured out that all the rocks, trees, animals, and even air surrounding us is made up of indescribably small pieces of various sorts with different but predictable properties. Starting with the addition of objects to form sums, we’ve worked our way up to quaternions, fractals, and Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, all of which have real-world uses. We know how magnets work. We figured out how to preserve indefinitely the words we speak and, later, the images we see and the scenes that play out before our eyes.

I’m amazed to see a fellow human solve puzzles that I can’t make head or tail of; so how much awe should we feel at the accomplishments we as a species have racked up, starting with nothing but the evidence of our own senses and the reasoning of our intellect?

To be clear, what I’m marveling at is not that humans are smarter than other animals. I’m smarter than animals, but I still can’t solve complex logic problems. But we as a species can and have figured out things many orders of magnitude more complicated and obscure than the hardest logic problem I’ve ever encountered. What I’m marveling at is how much smarter humanity is than me, or any other individual.

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.

For example, the German for “The cat walks through the door” is Die Katze geht durch die Tür. Cat and door are both common rather than proper nouns, so neither is capitalized in English, but in German they both are. English, like Danish, formerly capitalized the way German does. For example, consider the following passage from Isaac Newton’s Opticks (1717):

Motion is much more apt to be lost than got, and is always upon the Decay.  For Bodies which are either absolutely hard, or so soft as to be void of Elasticity, will not rebound from one another. Impenetrability makes them only stop. If two equal Bodies meet directly in vacuo, they will by the Laws of Motion stop where they meet, and lose all their Motion, and remain in rest, unless they be elastick, and receive new Motion from their Spring.

As you can see, the capitalization is not 100% consistent. The Latin noun vacuum, found in the phrase “in vacuo,” is not capitalized, and neither is the English noun rest, for no apparent reason. Of course, the man was a scientist, not a stylist, so perhaps we should cut him some slack.

To a modern English speaker, this kind of seemingly random capitalization is seen as a marker of old-timey English. In fact, not only is it not random, it’s tied to a specific time period: the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In an older work like the Canterbury Tales (late 14th century) the capitalization is nearly as modern as the spelling is archaic. For more on why this trend in capitalization may have begun and ended, see this Ask Metafilter thread.

Of course, now that we’ve switched to our current system of proper-noun capitalization (which is something of a compromise between the German and Romance systems) it would be a huge hassle to switch back to all-noun capitalization. To be clear, I am not proposing that. Nor am I proposing that German switch to our system. As an idle question, though, I want to figure out which system is better.

First, what are the advantages of all-noun capitalization?

• It can eliminate ambiguity. This is particularly true in English, where it’s not uncommon for a verb and a noun to have the same spelling (affect, bother, control, defect, engineer, etc.). One place this ambiguity can cause problems is in crash blossoms, newspaper headlines whose intended interpretations are unclear because of syntactic ambiguity. (There is a blog devoted to them, although its standards are not high.) Recently, for example, I saw the headline “GOP Waivers Might Rule” in the print edition of the Capitol Hill paper Roll Call. The last three words there could be either verbs or nouns, and it takes a few seconds at least before the reader can identify their roles in this headline. In German, there would be no ambiguity; “Might Rule,” the actual verb phrase here, would be lowercase, and “Waivers,” the noun, would stay uppercase. (In German, and in our hypothetical all-noun capitalization English, headlines are capitalized the same way as normal sentences.)

• All-noun capitalization is also much simpler than proper-noun capitalization, especially as the latter is practiced in English. Capitalizing only proper nouns, titles, and the first word in a sentence may seem simple, but there are enough complications—what counts as a title? which words in a title do you capitalize, exactly? when a proper noun becomes genericized, like xerox or teleprompter, do you still capitalize it? in a rapid series of questions like this one, must each initial letter be capitalized?—that only highly educated and conscientious Anglophones can manage to write for long without slipping up. We regard it as a fact of life that comments on websites, for example, are generally misspelled, mispunctuated, and miscapitalized, but it doesn’t have to be that way. In languages with highly phonetic spelling, like some dialects of Spanish, spelling mistakes are rarer by several orders of magnitude. Many ancient languages, like Sanskrit and Classical Chinese, didn’t use any punctuation and therefore admitted of no mistakes. And in languages like German with simple capitalization rules, even children can manage to follow them without much difficulty. When orthographic conventions are simpler, less time and effort is needed to master them and differences in education and class are less apparent in writing, which may tend to promote equality and dispel prejudice.

But then, proper-noun capitalization has its advantages too:

• It’s useful to be able to distinguish common nouns from proper nouns. If I live near London, for example, and write that I’m going to the city, that’s very different from writing that I’m going to the City. I couldn’t say off the top of my head whether this kind of disambiguation is more or less useful than the crash blossom disambiguation of all-noun capitalization.
• Languages with diacritics (accent marks) sometimes omit them on capital letters, although sometimes they don’t. The Academie Française, for example, holds that even uppercase letters should have accent marks when appropriate, but in some casual French writing, as well as in Francophone Switzerland and Quebec, capital letters stand unaccented. Some non-American keyboards have keys for lowercase accented characters but not uppercase accented characters. Omitting the diacritics can make a big difference in meaning, as the examples halfway down this French Wikipedia page show; in at least one case, the lack of diacritics actually renders a phrase indistinguishable from its exact opposite. The less capitalization a language calls for, then, the less ambiguity will result from diacritic loss. This point does not apply to English, however.
• Selective capitalization is more useful as a channel of meaning in a proper-noun capitalization language. If I want to emphasize that I am Very Serious about something, I can do that in all-noun capitalization too, since neither word I’m selectively capitalizing is a noun. But if I want to talk about someone having Principles and Values, with the selective capitalization conveying a somewhat mocking tone, this subtlety would be lost in an all-noun capitalization language.
• Capital letters usually use slightly more ink when printed, which ultimately runs into money. Proper-noun capitalization uses fewer capital letters than all-noun capitalization, so it’s cheaper in the long run. This point does not apply to text on computer screens, as pixels are not scarce.
• When using a keyboard, it takes slightly more effort to type a capital letter, especially on a cell phone or for people who don’t have full use of both hands. This is both a practical and a moral consideration, since all-noun capitalization places more of a burden on the disabled.
• Proper-noun capitalization is more widely used than all-noun capitalization (which, as far as I know, is restricted to German and Luxembourgish), so a proper-noun capitalization language will tend to be easier for speakers of other languages to learn. This point does not apply to the abstract question of which system is inherently better, but it does apply to the practical question of which system is better in the context of the real world.

Adding up all the advantages and disadvantages in terms of disambiguation, practicality, stylistic tools, and social justice, it looks like proper-noun capitalization is the superior system, although I would not call the evidence presented here entirely conclusive.

Of course, languages do not generally adopt systems of capitalization out of purely rational concerns (with the possible exception of the 1948 Danish spelling reform). German, for example, may have adopted its all-noun capitalization system in part because of prevalent ideas about the central importance of nouns in language. If you asked a pre-20th century philosopher what language was, he (it would be a he) would likely phrase his answer in terms of “naming.” Pre-modern theories of the origin of language usually posit nouns as the first words. The Sun Language Theory, though it dates from the 1930s, is typical; it holds that language began when man looked up at the sun and, overwhelmed by his feelings, named it by saying “Ag,” a syllable from which all other words are derived. (Whether that primordial “Ag” was capitalized or not is unclear.)

The origins of language are still obscure and controversial, of course, and I don’t mean to imply that nouns weren’t (or were) the first part of speech. As for their importance in a language, that varies; Jorge Luis Borges, in his famous story “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” imagines languages that use only verbs or adjectives instead of nouns, so that instead of The moon rose above the water you’d say something that would translate literally as Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned. I don’t know of any such languages in the real world, but different languages do distribute semantic work differently among different parts of speech. For example, take the sentence It’s raining. In Romance, Germanic, and Baltic languages, the (pro)noun does very little work and sometimes doesn’t appear at all, while the verb carries essentially all of the semantic load. In some East Slavic languages, on the other hand, the sentence looks something like Идет дождь (Idjot dozhd’, literally, The rain goes), with the noun carrying essentially all of the semantic load and the verb mostly hanging around for appearance’s sake.

The noun doesn’t have to be the main unit of language, then, but the Germans who first standardized their orthography didn’t know that. Perhaps that played a role in their system of capitalization—I don’t know for sure. But what’s done is done, and even if our proper-noun capitalization is in fact superior, all that justifies is a mild sense of superiority in countries outside of Germany and Luxembourg.

Cross-posted from Empire Avenue.