L/V 10 Tip of the Day #53 Search -- proper nouns and capitonyms

MJ. Smith

Another tip of the day (TOTD) series for Logos/Verbum 10. They will be short and often drawn from forum posts. Feel free to ask questions and/or suggest forum posts you'd like to see included. Adding comments about the behavior on mobile and web apps would be appreciated by your fellow forumites. A search for "L/V 10 Tip of the Day site:community.logos.com" on Google should bring the tips up as should this Reading List within the application.

This tip is inspired by the forum post: A curious question -- - Logos Forums

In English, proper names are identified by being capitalized.

god vs. God

god - a general term for any deity

God - the specific deity of most monotheistic religions (though some have a different name for God, such as Allah)

There is actually a term for such words that change their meaning when they are capitalized: capitonym (there's a list of English examples at that Wikipedia page).

Though those are quite rare in other languages besides English, they are not entirely nonexistent. For example, in German, Laut = sound, and laut = loud.

Identifying a specific capitonym (or proper name) in a search is managed by the match case option (the Aa icon):

• in the left column the match case option is off. The results will be the same whether you search for "god" or "God" i.e. the results will include both.
• in the center column the match case option is on. With the search argument "god", the results will show only "god" i.e. when a general term for any deity is meant. Yes, there are possible false negatives because the first word of a sentence is capitalized.
• in the right column the match case option is on. With the search argument "God", the results will show only "God," the specific deity of most monotheistic religions. Yes, there are possible false positives where the generic "god" is the first word of a sentence.