Timeline for Why is "abelian" infrequently capitalized?
Current License: CC BY-SA 2.5
8 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Nov 30, 2023 at 12:01 | comment | added | Oskar Limka | @Qfwfq they actually teach you that it is a grammatical mistake. | |
| Jul 6, 2015 at 16:40 | comment | added | Martin Ueding | In German, there are now “Riemann'sche Fläche”, “Riemannsche Fläche” and “riemannsche Fläche”. None of them are wrong, since the latest grammar reform more or less allowed everything. I'd say German is even more arbitrary there. | |
| Nov 7, 2010 at 8:57 | comment | added | Laurent Moret-Bailly | The French rule is that no adjective should be capitalised (except of course at the beginning of a sentence). This rule is nowadays often violated, obviously under the influence of English. The rule extends to the nouns derived from adjectives ("le laplacien") with the strange exception of geographic/ethnic origins: "un ami italien" vs. "un Italien". | |
| Nov 6, 2010 at 17:57 | comment | added | Michael Hardy | I wasn't saying German is more consistent than English. The problem in English was "abelian" as an isolated exception. (If one wants to get into complications of German usages in such matters, there are also adjectives that get capitalized when used as nouns even though they still follow adjective declensions rather than noun declensions. E.g. "der Auszubildende" = the apprentice, "ein Auszubildender" = an apprentice (the final "r" isn't there when the definite article is used), "die Auszubildende" = the (female) apprentice (without the feminine suffix one uses when it's simply a noun).) | |
| Nov 5, 2010 at 23:46 | comment | added | Colin Reid | I'm not sure German is any more consistent about this than English. In any case the 'rule' isn't so simple, because for instance adjectives derived from city names are generally capitalised. | |
| Nov 5, 2010 at 22:32 | comment | added | Qfwfq | I guess the french, ops, French practice is like the Italian one: they teach you in elementary school that capitalizing an adjective that comes from a noun of person (or geogrphic region, people, languages etc) is a grammar mistake. | |
| Nov 5, 2010 at 18:28 | comment | added | Ketil Tveiten | What's the French practise? It seems that it would be of interest, given the influence of French mathematicians in the last century. | |
| Nov 5, 2010 at 15:42 | history | answered | Michael Hardy | CC BY-SA 2.5 |