Nikki writes:
1: Out of our 25 capitalisation standards, 19 are normal sentence case (i.e. first letter and all proper nouns capitalised), 4 are every word capitalised except for a short list of conjunctions etc. and just French and German are complex enough to require the editor to understand the language.
This is an interesting statistic. I wonder if the prevalence of "Sentence case" in different languages, and the possibility of a bias for people to prefer the capitalization of their native language, may be the motivation for "simplification" here.
The "simplicity" of the sentence case standard makes we wonder whether it might be possible to find a technological solution to this problem that makes more people happy. If it weren't for the pesky problem with proper nouns, it would be possible to implement a user preference for "Sentence capitalization always" - which would force all titles into Sentence capitalization for tagging and (non-editable) display. This might reduce the clamor by people who find unfamiliar capitalization standards confusing, but could cause more problems than it solves, as it would create an invisible division in the community. People who selected that preference might blithely add titles in sentence case regardless of the appropriate language standard; disabling the forced Sentence caps in editable fields is an attempt to prevent that kind of behavior, but it would be an incomplete solution.
At any rate, the pretty-much-insoluble problem of proper nouns makes this impractical, although it might be worthwhile to have a TaggerScript option for this (especially if a file with a user-provided list of proper nouns were an option). (Acronyms and other words with more than one capital letter would be considered as proper nouns implicitly).
For the record, my personal preference is for the current French capitalization standard; although despite my name I'm not a native French speaker. I can even understand the distinction between the behavior for definite and indefinite articles, since the former are more specific; they are accordingly a step or two closer to the specificity of a proper nouns, which seem to be worthy capitalization in every language that has such a concept. And the capitalization of initial noun phrases is not so dissimilar from the German rule of capitalizing Nouns.
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