Opinion query: Capitalization of species/race

[Karretch]

Apologies if this doesn't quite fit here, I felt it was safer than posting in the TiTS section and having it be out of place there.

This is mostly for typo fixes/suggestions, but what's the general consensus on capitalizing the name of a creature or race. For specific example, in the old forums there was a TiTS typo thread that suggested capitalizing one instance of 'mimbrane' just because all others were capitalized. However, unless this is yet another failure of the US eductation system, this seems like an unnecessary thing to do. We don't capitalize species common names, like 'red wolf' or 'human'. But then there's the whole 'society named after planet and/or race' thing, like Ausar, which then butts up against descriptive use of a species/society not being capitalized. I'm at a lack of ways to properly describe my issue so I apologize if this is hard to follow and will gladly clarify if I can.

Rather than shoving my foot in my mouth for thinking I'm correct I'd like to actually know what to say for stuff like this.

 

[Kesil]

Personally, I don't like capitalizing species names. As you have well stated, we just don't go typing stuff in real life stuff like "this is my Dog!", so I think that doing it for the game could be pointless, except in the rare case that a single race dominated a planet (e.g. saying that the Wheteverians are a race hailing from planet Whatever). Perhaps, that could be applied to societies as well, but I might be wrong.

 

[Jacques00]

I think the capitalization is completely context based. I remember discussing this some time back and the consensus was that if you, or the character speaking/describing, is directly addressing the culture/planet/race, then it should be capitalized as a proper name. Otherwise, it's just used as a regular non-capitalized word (noun, adjective, etc.).

For mimbranes, I think the majority of the text from the original document was stylized to be capitalized as a proper name, but following the scheme of how TiTS races are set up, I think it's okay to have instances of "mimbranes" to describe/refer to them in a generic sense. Not sure if it is necessary to drop an entire bug/typo report on it though--depends if it's a glaring issue, I suppose (like in the case of acronyms or actual names). Misspellings, wrong word usage, and broken sentences are probably higher priority than capitalization nuances when it comes to typos.

There might be a section in the TiTS writing guide that refers to this specific issue--if not, then maybe there should be a request for that.

 

[Gedan]

There might be a section in the TiTS writing guide that refers to this specific issue--if not, then maybe there should be a request for that.

There is indeed.

 

[Karretch]

Has that been reposted yet? I'm scouring the place and can't find it.

 

[JimThermic]

You're not meant to capitalize unless it's at the start of a sentence. Personally, I find it weird not to capitalize a race name in some contexts, but that's the style used.

 

[Svelliphore]

You're not meant to capitalize unless it's at the start of a sentence. Personally, I find it weird not to capitalize a race name in some contexts, but that's the style used.

Unfortunately, I think it's more complicated than that. Last time I checked, the TiTS writing guide stated that racial names derived from proper nouns, most notably planet names, are to be capitalized in all cases, while other racial names are supposed to act as common nouns in terms of capitalization. So we'd have "zil,' "raskvel," "kaithrit" because they're not named after a planet, but terms like "Terran" and "Mhen'gan" are supposed to be capitalized. To further complicate matters, Myrellion brought about a new distinction: the two social groups of Red and Gold Myr are capitalized even though it's not clear that these terms are really derived from the planet name "Myrellion." And even worse, I can't really find evidence that the original guidelines were actually followed very well. On the Wiki, the codex entry for "galotian" uses lowercase even though they come from the home world of Galotia; and "ausar" is also generally lowercase even though it seems to be related in some way to the name of the planet "Ausaril." Meanwhile, "Mimbrane" is mostly capitalized on the Wiki (and I think in game) even though it doesn't appear to be derived from a planet name or any other proper noun.

One large difficulty is that since most alien races are associated with one particular culture, the line between biological terms and cultural terms is quite blurry. In real life, while biological terms are generally lowercase (dog, cat, mouse) cultural terms are generally capitalized (Ottoman, Italian, Portuguese).

Another closely related issue that should probably be addressed is the use or non-use of the definite article. (While it's not totally impossible to use phrases like "the humans," "the elves," and "the centaurs," it seems to me to be more common to omit the article with these already-established racial terms -- the Human codex entry only uses the phrase "the Humans" once, in the title. This seems to me to contrast a little with the article on "the thraggen.")

 

[Karretch]

Woah, Svell, awesome job

 

[Noob Salad]

It's complicated. I mean you wouldn't capitalize "human" or "blue whale" in real life. Locations (planets) and organizations (groups) are fine though.