Pronoun Capitalization

[Angrboda]

I made an ass of myself in a philosophy group discussion by forgetting that all nouns are capitalized in German. The question doesn't make much sense once you leave the idioms and lexicography of the romance languages, and it's likely the tradition stems from early editorial decisions concerning the Latin translation of the Koine Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic. (The bible gateway has Koine Greek translations with capitalization, but they are all too late to bear testimony to whether the original autographs would have observed such conventions; I rather doubt it.) I'd have to look at a range of examples through time to see if and when the practice began in any of these languages (as well as the early Syriac forks of the text, and exemplars such as the Samaritan bible, the didache and diatessoron, and pseudoepigraphia both within Catholic and Eastern Orthodox tradition, and outside of it. (Ask pineapplebunnybounce about the names of 'God' in Chinese sometime, and know that when you unwind those terms across the ages back to their roots in the Spring and Autumn period, it just gets absurdly silly.) I suspect, without researching it, that the capitalization just reflects some early editorial decisions by the church fathers, and that the explanations given here are analogous to folk etymologies. It's a strange practice when you realize that the only people at the time who would be aware of the practice were specialists who needed no help in their own minds, and yet provided no signal in word or sound to the ignorant masses over which the recitation of these holies was deemed to be effective for salvation.