theScorpion
1 Jun 2011
Language / Capitalisation in Polish language; uncapitalised car marques (fiat, buick, honda)? [17]
I've never heard a rule that car makes have to be written with a lower case letter. As a matter of fact, it would be unnatural to me to write "To jest toyota mojego brata" or "Kupiłem wczoraj nowe audi". I think the problem is that these are not proper nouns, inasmuch as they come from names of companies producing cars. It's a similar case as with the words Coke or Velcro in English - they come from names of products of certain companies but were incorporated into common language to refer generically to objects of their type and no longer exclusively to a specific product. Now this where Polish and English diverge - the former will use lower case and the latter will capitalise. But if you consider another examples given by Polonius, you can draw a conclusion that there is much tendency to capitalise in English and quite the opposite is true for Polish.
I've never heard a rule that car makes have to be written with a lower case letter. As a matter of fact, it would be unnatural to me to write "To jest toyota mojego brata" or "Kupiłem wczoraj nowe audi". I think the problem is that these are not proper nouns, inasmuch as they come from names of companies producing cars. It's a similar case as with the words Coke or Velcro in English - they come from names of products of certain companies but were incorporated into common language to refer generically to objects of their type and no longer exclusively to a specific product. Now this where Polish and English diverge - the former will use lower case and the latter will capitalise. But if you consider another examples given by Polonius, you can draw a conclusion that there is much tendency to capitalise in English and quite the opposite is true for Polish.