Reverential capitalization is the practice of capitalizing religious words that refer to deities or divine beings in cases where the words would not otherwise have been capitalized. Pronouns are also particularly included in reverential capitalization:
and God calleth to the light 'Day,' and to the darkness He hath called 'Night;' and there is an evening, and there is a morning — day one.
In this example, the proper name "God", like "Day" and "Night", is capitalized and the pronoun "He" is a reverential capitalization. While proper names are capitalized universally, reverence for any particular divinity is not universal. In short, when pronouns that are usually lowercase are capitalized, this usually implies that the author personally reveres and regards as a deity the antecedent of that pronoun.
Nouns which are used as titles for a deity may also be capitalized. Examples include "the Lord", "the Father" and "the Creator".
Capitalization, punctuation and spelling were not well standardized in Early Modern English; for example, the 1611 King James Bible (KJV) did not capitalize pronouns:
For our heart shall rejoice in him, because we have trusted in his holy name.
— Psalm 33:21, KJV
In the 17th and 18th centuries, it became common to capitalize all nouns, as is still done in some other Germanic languages, including German.
In languages that capitalize all nouns, reverential capitalization of the first two letters or the whole word can sometimes be seen. The following is an example in Danish, which capitalized nouns until 1948. [1]
Vi troe paa en eeneste GUD, en almægtig Skaber af alle Ting, saavel synlige som u-synlige, og paa en HErre JEsum Christum, GUds eeneste Søn, fød af Faderen[...]
(Translation) We believe in the one and only GOD, an almighty Creator of all Things, visible as well as invisible, and in a LOrd JEsus Christ, GOd's only Son, born of the Father[...]
Note that some instances are in all capitals (GUD "GOD"), and some begin with two capital letters (HErre "LOrd", JEsum "JEsus"). Some words that refer to persons of the Trinity begin with a single capital (Skaber "Creator", Christum "Christ", Faderen "the Father"), but so do all other nouns (Ting "Things"). This type of reverential capitalization varies within a single sentence and would also be dependent on the author and the publisher of a work.
The convention of capitalizing all nouns was eventually abandoned in English, and one of the people who was influential in this was Benjamin Blayney, who produced a 1769 edition of the Bible in which nouns were not capitalized—possibly simply to save space on the printed page. [4]
Capitalization of deities is also customarily applied in religious texts written in Tagalog and other Philippine languages. This is despite the practice being considered non-standard and inconsistent by purists, who contend it applies only to English.[ citation needed ]
In the 19th century, it became common to capitalize pronouns referring to the God of the Abrahamic religions, in order to show respect:
For in Him doth our heart rejoice, For in His holy name we have trusted.
An interesting early case is Handel's 1741 oratorio Messiah, whose printed libretto and published score both use lower case pronouns, but whose holograph conductor's score consistently capitalizes:
…day of His coming … when He appeareth"
In the 20th century this practice became far less common:
For our heart rejoices in him, because we have trusted in his holy name.
— Psalms 33:21, World English Bible (1997)
Today there is no widely accepted rule in English on whether or not to use reverential capitalization. Different house styles have different rules given by their style manuals. The Christian Writer's Manual of Style, The Chicago Manual of Style, [7] and the Associated Press Stylebook do not recommend it. It is prescribed, for example, by the US Government Printing Office Style Manual (2008). [8]
It is also seen in King James 21st Century Edition and Biblehub's King James Purple Letter Edition.[ citation needed ]
A proper noun is a noun that identifies a single entity and is used to refer to that entity as distinguished from a common noun, which is a noun that refers to a class of entities and may be used when referring to instances of a specific class. Some proper nouns occur in plural form, and then they refer to groups of entities considered as unique. Proper nouns can also occur in secondary applications, for example modifying nouns, or in the role of common nouns. The detailed definition of the term is problematic and, to an extent, governed by convention.
Ludvig Holberg, Baron of Holberg was a writer, essayist, philosopher, historian and playwright born in Bergen, Norway, during the time of the Dano–Norwegian dual monarchy. He was influenced by Humanism, the Enlightenment and the Baroque. Holberg is considered the founder of modern Danish and Norwegian literature. He was also a prominent Neo-Latin author, known across Europe for his writing. He is best known for the comedies he wrote in 1722–1723 for the Lille Grønnegade Theatre in Copenhagen. Holberg's works about natural and common law were widely read by many Danish law students over two hundred years, from 1736 to 1936.
Capitalization or capitalisation is writing a word with its first letter as a capital letter and the remaining letters in lower case, in writing systems with a case distinction. The term also may refer to the choice of the casing applied to text.
In Modern English, he is a singular, masculine, third-person pronoun.
The word thou is a second-person singular pronoun in English. It is now largely archaic, having been replaced in most contexts by the word you, although it remains in use in parts of Northern England and in Scots. Thou is the nominative form; the oblique/objective form is thee ; the possessive is thy (adjective) or thine ; and the reflexive is thyself. When thou is the grammatical subject of a finite verb in the indicative mood, the verb form typically ends in -(e)st, but in some cases just -t.
Elohim, the plural of אֱלוֹהַּ, is a Hebrew word meaning "gods" or "godhood". Although the word is grammatically plural, in the Hebrew Bible it most often takes singular verbal or pronominal agreement and refers to a single deity, particularly the God of Israel. In other verses it refers to the singular gods of other nations or to deities in the plural.
Letter case is the distinction between the letters that are in larger uppercase or capitals and smaller lowercase in the written representation of certain languages. The writing systems that distinguish between the upper- and lowercase have two parallel sets of letters: each in the majuscule set has a counterpart in the minuscule set. Some counterpart letters have the same shape, and differ only in size, but for others the shapes are different. The two case variants are alternative representations of the same letter: they have the same name and pronunciation and are typically treated identically when sorting in alphabetical order.
A capitonym is a word that changes its meaning when it is capitalized; the capitalization usually applies due to one form being a proper noun or eponym. It is a portmanteau of the word capital with the suffix -onym. A capitonym is a form of homograph and – when the two forms are pronounced differently – is also a form of heteronym. In situations where both words should be capitalized, there will be nothing to distinguish between them except the context in which they are used.
Title case or headline case is a style of capitalization used for rendering the titles of published works or works of art in English. When using title case, all words are capitalized, except for minor words that are not the first or last word of the title. There are different rules for which words are major, hence capitalized. As an example, a headline might be written like this: "The Quick Brown Fox Jumps over the Lazy Dog".
The English personal pronouns are a subset of English pronouns taking various forms according to number, person, case and grammatical gender. Modern English has very little inflection of nouns or adjectives, to the point where some authors describe it as an analytic language, but the Modern English system of personal pronouns has preserved some of the inflectional complexity of Old English and Middle English.
Personal pronouns are pronouns that are associated primarily with a particular grammatical person – first person, second person, or third person. Personal pronouns may also take different forms depending on number, grammatical or natural gender, case, and formality. The term "personal" is used here purely to signify the grammatical sense; personal pronouns are not limited to people and can also refer to animals and objects.
The English word god comes from the Old English god, which itself is derived from the Proto-Germanic *gudą. Its cognates in other Germanic languages include guþ, gudis, guð, god, and got.
The books of the New Testament frequently cite Jewish scripture to support the claim of the Early Christians that Jesus was the promised Jewish Messiah. Scholars have observed that few of these citations are actual predictions in context; the majority of these quotations and references are taken from the prophetic Book of Isaiah, but they range over the entire corpus of Jewish writings.
In Modern English, she is a singular, feminine, third-person pronoun.
In Modern English, I is the singular, first-person pronoun.
A system of grammatical gender, whereby every noun was treated as either masculine, feminine, or neuter, existed in Old English, but fell out of use during the Middle English period; therefore, Modern English largely does not have grammatical gender. Modern English lacks grammatical gender in the sense of all noun classes requiring masculine, feminine, or neuter inflection or agreement; however, it does retain features relating to natural gender with particular nouns and pronouns to refer specifically to persons or animals of one or other sexes and neuter pronouns for sexless objects. Also, in some cases, feminine pronouns are used by some speakers when referring to ships, to churches, and to nation states and islands.
The Sacred Scriptures Bethel Edition (SSBE) is a Sacred Name Bible which uses the names Yahweh and Yahshua in both the Old and New Testaments. It was produced by Jacob O. Meyer, based on the American Standard Version of 1901 and it contains over 977 pages. The Assemblies of Yahweh printed 5,500 copies of the first edition in 1981. It is also used by some members of the Sacred Name Movement.
Capitalization or capitalisation in English grammar is the use of a capital letter at the start of a word. English usage varies from capitalization in other languages.
In English, possessive words or phrases exist for nouns and most pronouns, as well as some noun phrases. These can play the roles of determiners or of nouns.
The NBV21 is an ecumenical Dutch-language Bible translation, created by the Dutch-Flemish Bible Society and published in 2021. The NBV21 is a revised version of the New Bible Translation of 2004. In comparison to the NBV, around 12,000 edits were made to the NBV21. A major difference was the implementation of highly-requested reverential capitalization, in addition to other edits motivated by new discoveries in Biblical studies. Reactions of readers to the previous version were also taken into account in the NBV21.