the future of capitalization

i have a good friend who never capitalizes a single thing he types. you'll notice that i rarely capitalize--usually only with names and sometimes not even then.

one of my very favourite professors says, on his website,

"i don't like capitals because they take control of emphasis and spatial design, when the beginnings of sentences and proper nouns are not necessarily where i want to place emphasis."

this interested me the first time i saw it, but i didn't think much about it.

but now i return to the topic, and ponder in depth the topic of capitalization.

the wikipedia entry on capitalization mentions that:

The full rules of capitalization for English are complicated and have changed over time, generally to capitalize fewer terms; to the modern reader, an 18th century document seems to use initial capitals excessively.

and so i am now full of conjecture. could it be possible that capitalization may disappear?

probably not... but it might fade. convention may relax its hold and style may take over. language is in an endless state evolution, you know. and there are so many other ways to mark things down in writing. punctuation, spacing, color, size. punctuation happens to be one of my very favourites. my sentences, as you see, are chopped up by full stops. for all the fiddley little folds and dips and tucks within those sentences there are hyphens and dashes, elipses and commas. i dearly love semicolons. punctuation is a beautiful thing.

going back to wikipedia, the entry on punctuation tells us that punctuation marks are

...written symbols that do not correspond to either phonemes (sounds) of a spoken language nor to lexemes (words and phrases) of a written language, but which serve to organize or clarify written language.

this is an interesting thought. punctuation isn't something we really pronounce? well, i guess not technically--but will you argue if i say that "hey!" should probably sound different from "hey." if read aloud?

on the other hand, you certainly cannot pronounce capital letters--at least not in any way that makes much sense. whether i capitalize president or not, it still sounds the same. or it should. though books sometimes make reference to an obvious, marked difference between animal and Animal (as Gregory Maguire does in his Wicked, for example), i don't know how i'd pronounce the difference. do you? yes, it does make sense in a purely textual medium. but outside of that world? in everyday life? not likely.

punctuation makes a great deal more difference than capitalization in terms of the way we read. i know that all visual cues are useful to our human brains as they read words, and the redundancy of a full stop and a capital letter makes it easy to find the breaking points between sentences. capitals make it easy to recognize names and places and such. that's just wonderful.

so?

things change.

this is not the 18th century. control of emphasis and spatial design doesn't need to remain in the hands of standard english grammar rules. language is a tool to be used, and usage is the sovereign king of language.