Some bands are by a number of people written in capital letters only. Sometimes even the bands themselves do that or their labels, meaning that when I buy their stuff in digital format, band names are capitalised. In my system I don't like this because it isn't consistent with the others, and actually more often than not, they're not consistently doing that themselves, so I have to edit the band name in order for my system to recognise that YES are actually Yes, CAN are Can, and MONO are Mono.

Is there anybody out there who'd like to defend capitalisation? (As long as we're not talking about abbreviations such as PFM.)

There's absolutely no defense for all-capitals--  my God, even posties Ui don't use all-caps! ... that said, how about the NeBeLNeST font where only consonants are capitalized ~

mathman0806 wrote: And a few bands stylize there name in all lowercase. No prog bands coming to mind right now, but there was a post punk band that went by lowercase.

Yes, I've seen this too, and it's no better.

ABBA, AKT, ASIA, CIRCA:, FM, FROM.UZ, GTR, RPWL, TOOL, U2, UB40, UK, XTC, XYZ

I guess is one of the things we have to deal with when we talk about the digital format. 

And don't forget iNFiNiEN, for mixed caps.

I really don't care how the bands capitalize their names, but I do frequently have to edit MP3 tags to make their name consistent from album to album so that they show up as the same artist. A recent case in point: Arti & Mestieri (on Universi Paralleli) vs Arti + Mesteri (on Tilt) vs Arti E Mestieri (in PA).

Let 'em do what they want. It's their name. And the folks that tag MP3 files will probably never be consistent.

If people had to go to prison for this, I bet this would end that practice.

It's actually...

Hi,

I don't have an opinion as such on this ... each person/group/band will do what they feel they need to and we all accept that is Ok, and a part of their individuality.

In some cases there are some circumstances that make sense. In the case of YES, and CAN, I can see that the capitalization of the letters is probably a way to ensure that folks realize that it is a band and not just something else. Can, specially, would be a more interesting reason, since in those days, you bought large amounts of ________ and it was called a "can", at least here in the West Coast. 

PFM or BMS, is fine since they abbreviations of their actual name, but Mono, I can not imagine a reason for it, unless there already was a band named "Mono" somewhere else.

Not really sure how to even discuss this ... since reasons are not always visible although I think that YES/Yes is likely more obvious than the others.

JD wrote: ... FM, GTR, RPWL, XTC, XYZ

FM, GTR and RWPL (I think) are fine since they appear to be abbreviations. XTC is a definite odd one, but on par with the personality of the band. XYZ is one of those ... what? I think they named the band to simply state that the name did not mean a whole lot besides the music!

https://www.discogs.com/artist/5283430-XAVLEGBMAOFFFASSSSITIMIWOAMNDUTROABCWAPWAEIIPPOHFFFX" rel="nofollow - https://www.discogs.com/artist/5283430-XAVLEGBMAOFFFASSSSITIMIWOAMNDUTROABCWAPWAEIIPPOHFFFX

CAN phucking rule!!!!

I reviewed their album a way back. BOOOOOOOORING (in all caps)

That sums it up neatly.

Tapfret wrote: ni

ni hao!

ni hao means hello in mandarin chinese!

as i've learned through learning the three jurisdictions of LAW, capitalization changes intrinsic jurisdiction over the name presented

as for stylizing band names, doesn't really bother me

This is a bit off-topic, but some of the newsgroups I used to hang out in while in college (late 1980s into early 1990s, before the WWW became what it is today) made use of similar forms of capitalization for entire posts. I think sometimes it was meant to mock something (as this happened more often in flame groups), but it seemed some of the goofier posters just liked the way it looked. I even wrote a script in an ancient programming language called Rexx (on a VM/CMS mainframe) that did this to blocks of text using a random number generator (didn't have to write this, was just a call to a subroutine package).

I always wanted to do that but I'm too stupid for it.

^ not a matter of intelligence, it's a matter of time and dedication.

Mandarin Chinese is quite logical and easier than you think once you recognize radicals.

The hardest part is memorizing all the characters and the tones.

Ohh yes, tones is a biggy. I traveled to China for work for a previous company, of course 'knee-how' was first thing I learned. I picked up quite a bit of Mandarin during my trips, none of it stuck though. Fascinating culture, and all the food I ate was nothing short of spectacular.

I've studied Mandarin a bit but am by no means an expert. On the positive side, there are no capital letters! No plurals and the grammar is fairly straight forward. If i had more time i would love to explore the language and culture more but only so many hours in a puppy day :D

Even learning the characters was easier than I expected.

Of course you're right; in fact stupidity was a stupid word to use there , but my memory is really bad.

Exactly. Once you learn the radicals (components of the characters) it IS logical indeed.

The one annoying problem with characters though is that you can't use a dictionary until you learn all the radicals and recognize which ones are primary!

At least Mandarin has 4 tones. Some Chinese languages like Cantonese have 6!!!!