Inner major

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FleischQualität - internal major in advertising

CamelCase (s), ( Mhd. : Loading and inside, inside 'and lat .: maiusculus, slightly larger), and the Binnenversal or Binnenversalie , called a capital letter (Versalie, Majuskel) inside of a word that does not is written entirely in capital letters.

use

The Binnenmajuskel is used in Latin scripts to emphasize individual semantic components ( lexemes ), i.e. to mark morphological criteria orthographically .

German language

“Thus says the Lord GOD”, Ezekiel 13, from the Luther Bible of 1534

In German , inner major muscles can be found in various authors from the time before the standardization of spelling, who consistently capitalized all sub-words in compound nouns ("RechenMaschine"). The greater-than-capitalization of the names of God (GOD, LORD), which was particularly widespread during the baroque , led to an inner major for other reasons . In the Luther Bible , the inner major E in HErr (in addition to the continuous spelling in capital letters: HERR) still serves to distinguish the divine name YHWH = GOD (set as LORD) from the general Lord (Hebrew adnj). See the picture as an example.

Writing rules

The official rules of the German spelling do not provide for a spelling with inner majorities; the exception to this rule are proper names such as B. GutsMuths , McPherson or DeJong . However, for some time now, female muscles have become more widespread, especially in brand names and in advertising . They are often used in product names because a special spelling can be protected as a brand name, e.g. B. NetCologne . A well-known early example from English is CinemaScope . The pioneers in Germany were the computer manufacturer Apple ( macOS , iPhone , ColorSync , AirPort , MacCheck ) and later the Deutsche Bahn with terms like BahnCard and RegionalExpress (meanwhile Regional Express ). This is particularly often used in compound words when an acronym from capital letters is in use and possibly better known, for example ICE for InterCityExpress (now officially Intercity-Express ).

Inland I

One form of the interior versal is the interior I, e.g. B. in readers. It has become naturalized in feminist media as a substitute for the generic masculine that is undesirable there , but also in legal texts (see, for example, Employee Protection Act ), but is now increasingly being replaced by a form such as the “Employee Protection Act” (see Gender Mainstreaming ). .

Other languages

In some Bantu languages such as isiZulu , isiXhosa and isiNdebele , a capital letter denotes the beginning of the word stem if it is a proper name.

In Irish , too , the root of inflected words given a prefix is ​​indicated by a capital letter. So does Sliabh na mBan , "Mountain of Women" which mBan the inflected form of bean is "woman." The Binnenmajuskel knows certain traditional spellings of family names; Examples are Scottish names like McDonald or MacIntosh , Irish names like FitzGerald or FitzPatrick, and Dutch names like DeJong.

The Dutch IJ has to be written as two consecutive capital letters I and J at the beginning of the word, like the IJsselmeer . Technically, however, this is not an internal major because the IJ is treated like a letter and needs to be distinguished from I + J.

In the SAMPA autograph, capital letters represent certain sounds.

In Italian , a capital letter can appear in the word if the polite personal pronoun of the third person is added to an infinitive, e.g. B. in “portarLe” for “bring you”.

Forums and social networks

In social networks and forums , for technical reasons (due to the lack of the ability to use spaces), for example, the inner major should be used to separate words in user names or hashtags , even if the word in question is actually not capitalized. Exceptions here are situations that would lead to a capital accumulation. (usually with acronyms : #NSAAffaire → #nsaAffaire ) (In addition, capitalization is ignored for linking purposes, which is why you cannot - accidentally - create minimal pairs like "#AaB - #aab".)

Fictional examples :

  • # D ieser B eispieltext Z isplays D ie F unktionsweise V on B innenmajuskeln I n H ashtags
  • # B acon M it S peck
  • edited by The E xample U ser

Real examples :

Programming languages

For source texts of computer programs there are different naming conventions for the use of inner capital letters in identifiers (for example the Hungarian notation , but also personal conventions), or inner capital letters are simply used to make long names clearer ("checkInputBuffer"). This notation has established itself because identifiers are normally not allowed to contain spaces.

When one speaks of " camel case ", then usually the "lowerCamelCase" variant is meant, in which the first letter of variables is lowercase. Example: myFloat as the name of a variable. Often you will also find the “UpperCamelCase” variant, in which the first letter is capitalized. This is also called " Pascal case ", after the programming language of the same name, in which this form represents the standard formatting. The terminology is not uniform, for example in the .NET framework it is common to speak of "Camel case" for the variant with initial minuskel and "Pascal case" for the variant with initial major . In object-oriented programming languages such as Java , but also in Basic , it is common to use the lowerCamelCase for the names of variables and methods and the UpperCamelCase for the names of classes .

An alternative solution to this problem is to use the underscore or hyphen instead of spaces. Which variant is used depends on the programming style . The variant with the underscore can be found in C , Perl , PL / 1 and PHP (up to version 4, after that the variant was only included for reasons of compatibility). In languages ​​from the Lisp family and in COBOL , the hyphen is common - hence also "lisp-case".

Wiki links

The inventor of the wiki systems, Ward Cunningham, used inner capitals in his original WikiWikiWeb to create links within the wiki; one speaks here of "CamelCase linking". In this way, the wiki syntax is very simple, as links do not have to be identified as such by additional characters. In an imaginary wiki syntax based on CamelCase, the input 

Besuche die Seite WikiPedia, um mehr über den [[Status (Arbeitsablauf)|Status]] des Projekts zu erfahren.

for this issue:

Visit the WikiPedia page to find out more about the status of the project.

Obviously, the use of CamelCase makes linking easy, but makes the text more difficult to read, occasionally creates unintended links or does not provide sufficient evidence for a link (for example with the exemplary word status). Prominent wiki engines that use CamelCase are MoinMoin , TWiki , UseModWiki, and WikiWikiWeb . Also MediaWiki - the software under the Wikipedia is operated - supports this notation for wiki-internal links, but it is disabled by default.

Examples

Since this way of writing terms has become very fashionable, it is more and more common for internal major muscles to be used incorrectly: TransAmerica ( Transamerica ), FireFox ( Firefox ), UseNet ( Usenet ), TimeWarner ( Time Warner ), GameBoy ( Game Boy ), PhotoShop ( Photoshop , originally correct) and BlackBox ( Black Box ).

literature

  • Joachim Grzega : Peculiar writing customs. To use apostrophes and inner capital letters . In: Joachim Grzega: Linguistics without technical jargon. 7 current studies for everyone interested in language . Shaker Verlag , Aachen 2001, ISBN 3-8265-8826-6 , pp. 57-70.

Web links

Commons : Binnenmajuskel  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
Wiktionary: Binnenmajuskel  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ .NET Framework General Reference - Capitalization Styles