Use of lowercase initials in compound nouns

In the study of linguistic facts, one of the assumptions that soon emerges concerns the use of capital letters in certain circumstances. To remember this fact, refer to the text “Capital and lowercase letters – circumstances in which they manifest themselves”, as some postulates will make all the difference in the learning that we are going to carry out.

Well, once these concepts are remembered, we set out towards the realization of our real objective: analyze about the use of lowercase initials in compound nouns, whose characteristics demarcated in it tend to “escape” a little from the then conventional rules. In this sense, in order to expand your linguistic competence about one more fact of the language, analyze some examples:
# God help us

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Bengal tiger

# Achilles' heel

god-give

Rufous Hornero...

Guinea pig

# maria goes with the others
We infer that words that normally should be spelled with capital letters (such as, God, Achilles, Mary, among others), in the case of compound nouns, they have an initial lowercase.

Another aspect, also relevant, concerns those demarcated by the symbol (#), whose spelling before the new spelling agreement was hyphenated, but now, with the new spelling reform, it is described without the use his.


By Vânia Duarte
Graduated in Letters

Would you like to reference this text in a school or academic work? Look:

DUARTE, Vânia Maria do Nascimento. "Use of lowercase initials in compound nouns"; Brazil School. Available in: https://brasilescola.uol.com.br/gramatica/uso-inicial-minuscula-substantivos-compostos.htm. Accessed on July 27, 2021.

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