Appendix talk:English capitonyms

Shantung and shantung?

May be a capitonym pair? One is the province, one is the cloth? --Geographyinitiative (talk) 12:17, 23 May 2021 (UTC)

Agreed! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:22, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

Category

Should we make this a category instead, a la Category:English palindromes? (It couldn't be automatically populated by {{head}} like that category, but still.) Benefit would be that a category is easier to add to; a drawback is that it's harder to monitor changes to a category. PS some entries in the dubiously-useful Category:English terms with optional capitalization might be appropriate for this category, e.g. alsatian dog vs Alsatian person. - -sche (discuss) 22:09, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

I approve of a category. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:20, 9 February 2022 (UTC)

On second thought, we might want to wait and see what kind and number of entries are in the list after a concerted effort to find examples, since it occurs to me that dividing the list into many sections (e.g. etymologically unrelated pairs, cases where Foobar is directly derived from foobar, cases involving names, etc) might be easier with an appendix than a category. I'm considering asking in Grease Pit for a list of all pairs of English entries that differ only by initial capitalization, perhaps only where both have definitions other than "alternative form / spelling / capitalization / etc of", but I suspect the list will be very large. There is probably a spectrum, from the trivial and IMO uninteresting but very common/productive process of converting words to names faith→Faith, river→River, smith→Smith, joy→Joy, fuller→Fuller, walker→Walker, etc, which we should probably exclude or list/categorize separately lest it utterly swamp the list... to Place~thing associated with place pairs like China~china, Belleek(place)~belleek(ware), or where a personal name is made into a word like Bismarck~bismarck... to cases where a personal or place name and unrelated word are accidentally homographic like Grant~grant or Oma~oma, which are perhaps more interesting, although depending on how many there are (there may be a lot), even there we might need to discuss whether it's worth listing pairs that include a name... to cases where the words share an origin (August~august, Catholic~catholic, etc)... to truly unrelated cases like German vs german. - -sche (discuss) 09:06, 10 February 2022 (UTC)

The subclass of 'places and fabrics named therefor' is a rich vein for list population here

A view of Category:en:Fabrics highlights the fruit to be harvested. (Ore veins? Tree fruits? I'm flexible with metaphors.) These word pairs belong to the "etymologically related" superclass. I have always found them interesting because they constitute an example subclass of the theme of knowledge that was materially important (heh) socioeconomically in various eras and places but nonetheless is largely unknown "trivia" to most people today. That theme is emblematic of a certain kind of heartache/nightmare in human affairs. I know what I mean by that, although it might take some explaining to adequately convey it to others. It sums up aphoristically as "the thing that you find trivial constituted my working life and livelihood, and those were almost my entire life." Quercus solaris (talk) 22:49, 25 March 2022 (UTC)

Update: I have entered the directly relevant, capitonymic ones (I think I got them all). Category:en:Fabrics also lists plenty more fabrics named after places, but those others' names are either nominalized adjectives or appellativizations that have not entirely reached lowercased orthographic status, rather than being capitonyms. Quercus solaris (talk) 02:30, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks! —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 02:44, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Bits

So they don't get lost in the BP discussion, I'm posting the following links:

• I generated some raw data which may be of interest to people populating this page. Most of the capitonyms are not "interesting" (for example, mundane initialisms seem definitely out of scope), but those that are interesting could be added to this page.
  • User:This, that and the other/capitonyms
• I also started looking at capitonyms beginning with ba- to experiment with different ways of grouping them into sections and presenting each capitonym in the list.
  • User:This, that and the other/capitonyms/ba

This, that and the other (talk) 08:49, 30 March 2022 (UTC)

Those pages are fascinating from a viewpoint of logical analysis and legwork. Great work. Duly acknowledging here that (1) as you said on the ba- page, the workup process is time-consuming, and (2) there is admittedly a component of academic quality to it (admitting that not all of the results are "interesting, in any practical way"). But the results are quite interesting from the viewpoints of "here is where the logic leads us" and also "who knew how many examples would be unearthed." Traditionally, most discussions of capitonyms have thrown out a bare handful of the usual suspects (eg, Polish/polish) and give up, leaving most of us with the impression that there aren't that many of them in the English language. What you've just taught me, with your cool subpages, is that that impression is mistaken, in a way that is obvious in retrospect. One thing I find interesting is how our sentient minds decide which examples are judged as "interesting, in a practical way" and which ones are judged as "too obscure to care about". It seems to me that it has to do with how broadly/widely each word is used and thus how frequently encountered in life. If a complete workup were to be integrated into this page (Appendix:English capitonyms) and we thus needed some organizing principles for how best to group them (as you mentioned), I think that an interesting concept for grouping could include a categorization into "cardinal examples", "not-quite-cardinal examples", and "more or less obscure examples", where the "etymologically unrelated" and "etymologically related" categories, as well as person-place-thing categories, would then be subcategories within each of the supercategories. Anyway, I don't know how hard this effort will end up being pursued, but there are great ideas here for how it could be done if so. Cheers, Quercus solaris (talk) 14:57, 30 March 2022 (UTC)