Uppercase and Lowercase Letters in Proper Names, Pseudonyms, Nicknames: Academic Rules of Russian Spelling

Abstract

The article proposes a detailed rule for the use of uppercase and lowercase letters in proper names, pseudonyms, and nicknames. It follows the systemic principle of personal names’ spelling under which a capital letter is used to mark the individualizing components of an anthroponymic pattern. The latter may also include various components written with lowercase letters such as function words (including untranslatable foreign prepositions, conjunctions, articles; common words indicating degree of kinship, gender, age) and definitions denoting social status, serving to impart courtesy, etc. The rule does not change the existing written norms while introducing the new ones to cover the structural types of names, nicknames, and pseudonyms that previously were not regulated at all or regulated only partially and inconsistently. The main rule is supplemented by a sub-rule exception on the spelling of names that are prepositional-case combinations or verb combinations, and a note introducing the correlation between capitalization in compound names and the writer’s understanding of the proper name’s delimitation (chicken Ryaba, Kurochka Ryaba). It also includes a paragraph applying to the following difficult cases: 1) ambiguous functional and semantic interpretation of words that make up the anthroponymic formula, 2) proper names used as appellatives (Mantoux test — to do a mantoux), 3) changing a surname spelling to single out a particular member of the family (for Romance and other European languages) (van Gogh — Van Gogh) or a general change in the spelling tradition (van de Velde — Vandevelde, la Grange — Lagrange), 4) rendering modern and historical names from Arabic and related languages, namely structural elements (the article al and its variants), kinship terms (ibn, bin, zade, ogly ‘son’, bint, kyzy, kyz ‘daughter’, but Abu ‘father’, Umm ‘mother’), terms of social status (aga, bey, murza, pasha), 5) rendering Chinese names.