"Rules" for capitalization?

lmcjipo

榜眼
Are there any rules for using capital letters in pinyin?

They don't appear to follow the standard English rule except that the first letter at the beginning of a sentence is in capital and that the first letter in someone (or someplace) is in capital.

For words that we normally capitalize in English like the days of the week or the names of the month, most books that have pinyin don't appear to capitalize this. They seem to follow the French way for capitalization.

Monday (English), lundi (French), xing1qi1yi1 (Mandarin-pinyin)
January (English), janvier (French), yi1yue4 (Mandarin-pinyin)

For pinyin, is there any rules for capitalization or is it basically a free for all?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
The PRC's "Basic Rules for Hanyu Pinyin Orthography" (as translated in the back of the ABC dictionary) state that you should capitalize:

* The first letter of each prose sentence,
* The first letter of each line of a poem,
* The first letter of a proper noun (both words if it's a two-word proper noun like He2ping2 Bin1guan3),
* The first letter of a combination of a proper noun and common noun (like Zhong1guo2ren2), unless it's a word that has "already become [a] common noun" (the example they give is guang3gan1, "Cantonese orange").

John DeFrancis is a big believer in the importance of proper Pinyin orthography, so entries in the ABC dictionary should be about as close to an accurate guide to proper capitalization as you can get, and according to that days of the week and months are all supposed to be capitalized. Which I guess means that they fall under the proper noun category.
 

lmcjipo

榜眼
Thanks Mike.

The textbook that we used in my Mandarin class (Integrated Chinese) doesn't seem to follow any rules per se nor do they explain capitalizing the Pinyin. However, things like "Zhong1quo2" & "Zhong1quo2ren2" are capital but the book also uses "jiu3yue4" and "xing1qi1yi1".

PlecoDict's Oxford dictionary also uses lowercase for jiu3yue4. However PlecoDict's NWP dictionary seems to follow the rules that you outlined (September = Shi2'er4 yue4")

I have to check my 2 non-software based dictionaries (Collins & Oxford) and see what they do.

This is why I thought it was basically a "free for all".
 
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