Capitalization in indigenous writing systems

I was recently visiting a small remote village. There were large sorghum fields all around. This village was notable for some of the environmental literacy which on could find in the area. Particularly the use of capitalization in names. In fact the name of the village had two capital letters.

Village name sign

This sort capitalization pattern of the use of capitalization word medially has seen its objections among onomastists. The suggestion has been that English does not allow for names to contain two capital letters and therefore references materials written in English containing non-English names should normalize capitalization so that only the first letter of names is capitalized. Obviously this is an uninformed but principled position to take. It is a serious matter to regularize a reference resource because it gives a filtered (and biased) view to users.

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