Re: OT: Capitalisation to signify uniqueness

Gary Shannon wrote:

>Just an odd random observation:
>
>While reading a book on philosophy just now I came
>across the word "Reality" spelled with an uppercase
>"R" much as we might write "God" with a capital "G".
>Yet when we speak of the Roman gods we do not
>capitalize the word "gods".  It occured to me that
>this is a subtle way that English has of signifying
>that the thing under discussion is thought to be the
>one and only instance of that thing.  I thought about
>a hypothetical world where only one book existed in
>the whole world.  If we lived in that world (and
>spolke English) surely we would refer to this object
>as "The Book", and not simply "the book."
Here, we have "the List".

This'll work in French, Spanish, any language that capitalises proper nouns.
It kind of turns the word for something into a proper name ("God" is a
proper name, isn't it?). What I'd like to know is how you could render such
a subtle effect into a language like German, where the nouns are capitalised
already.

>I wondered if other natlangs or conlangs had some
>subtle way of signifying that the thing under
>discussion was thought to be unique in all of Reality.
Articles could do something like this -- I'm sure I remember some discussion
way back about some conlang with an article that marks "the one and only X".

M

P.S.:

"He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to... to...
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't
have a good answer to."

-- from Douglas Adams' "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency"

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