Capitalization is obsolete

I don't think you can use a word like "obsolete" in this context. There hasn't been any dramatic upset or change in usage - capitalisation is as useful, or not, as it ever was.

It may indeed be useless, but that's another question. Many (most?) other languages have no concept of capital letters; personally, I like it in English - it does convey meaning and enhances readability, IMO.

I like capitals. But I think like many, I don't use them in certain contexts - IM, for example, which is highly informal and, more importantly, every sentence is on a new line. This is why full stops can be dropped there too, and it doesn't look weird or hard to read. But in continuous prose, like here - I would argue they are useful. The post, for example, is just that little bit harder to read for his lack of capitalisation.

The cost is not too high. Compared to glyph-based languages, English is remarkably efficient in terms of character space, so it's not like we'd benefit all that much from a reduced character set. It might indeed help in typing emails but .. I've never really considered that so much of a burden? The proper solution isn't to ditch the capitals, it's to finally perfect continuous speech dictation...

update: isn't the author really proposing that formal speech itself is obsolete?

I think it's easier to see the breaks between sentences with a capital letter rather than relying solely on a small period.

As a matter of information theory, whatever feature a writing system has tends to disambiguate sentences that would be ambiguous without that feature being marked. The late John DeFrancis had an excellent article in the first issue of the Journal of the Chinese Language Teachers Association called "Why Johnny Can't Read Chinese," in which he mentioned many issues of readability that differ between Chinese and English because of the different orthographies of the standard written forms of the two languages. Capitalization is useful in English, and it is habitual to me as a former editor of trade magazines and a law review. Other languages have no such thing as capitalization in the writing system, but they have some arbitrary feature or another that also conveys information to experienced readers of the language. Capitalization is NOT obsolete in English.

Capitalization is the difference between "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse" and "i helped my uncle jack off a horse".

(a) I think you mean "fewer and fewer examples"; saying "less and less" makes you sound like an idiot.

(b) The latter part of (a) may only apply when read by educated people, but since they're the people that make all the decisions, you should probably keep following proper grammatical syntax for now.

(c) This is basically like telling, say, Arabic linguists that reading right to left is "obsolete"; it's a language construct, it can't just magically become obsolete.

I suppose you could argue that capitalization is a formality, but then you'd have to make an argument against all formal speech. The biggest hurdle you'd have is convincing everyone that talking and writing in "txt speak" is acceptable. There are a lot of people, myself included, who would sooner die than see that day.

Don't forget that the whole purpose of writing is having it read. Anything that makes the reading easier without sacrificing accuracy is good. Capitalization, correct spelling, and to a lesser extent punctuation are foundations of good writing, because they improve readability and comprehension.

When I first saw the title of the post, I thought it was going to be about financial capitalization, but alas, some capital is still a requirement for business.

Incidentally, I think most people wouldn't take you seriously without the might of the shift key after every sentence ending period.

I write a whole paragraph without capitalization, then invoke my emacs script to automatically capitalize the paragraph. Problem solved.

That blog post was (in a way) persuasive...

It was substantially more difficult to read than it would have been had it been properly capitalized. I am now convinced that capitalization is not obsolete.

Since this is only about making it easier for the writer, there are any number of ways to have your writing auto-capitalized.

From the title, I thought he was talking about the practice of determining the market capitalizations for publicly traded companies. I was actually interested until I read the post.

Interesting. However, the blog fails to deal with the proper noun issue.

(Also, don't you think it's bad form to self submit your own short blog rants here?)

As an interesting data point, many Asian languages don't have a concept of capitalization in the language at all.