As Hellerick in his Slovjani text used capital letters very differently from how I would do it, I decided it's high time to stop capitalise according to my or anybody elses's personal preferences and introduce clear rules. So I looked at Slavic texts in Slavic Wikipedias and held a vote about capitalisation:
names of geographical regions - capital letters (Sredn'a Evropa, Voshodna Evropa)
names of countries - capital letters (Ukrajina, Czernogora, Rosija)
names of ethnic groups and their members - capital letters (Rusi, Pol'aki; Ukrajinec)
adjectives, names of languages - lowercase letters (horvatski, slovenaczki, bosnijski)
religions, their adherents, related adjectives - lowecase letters (hristijanstvo, hristijan, hristijanski)
multi-word proper names - all words are capitalised (according to the English custom - Organizacija od Objedinene Naciji, not *Organizacija od objedinene naciji
It's good that you noticed it, Gabriel. It was a hell to decide what should be capitalized, and what should not.
We usually don't notice it, but the situation in Russian is a complete disaster here. E.g. Organizacija Objedinennyh Nacij has all words capitalized, while in Organizacija stran eksporterov nefti only the first one is. In the official names of Russian divisions the republics have all words capitalized (Udmurtskaja Respublika), while the rest aren't given this honor (Krasnojarskij kraj).
But I'm afraid it's very difficult to state some clear rules here.
Names of geographical regions - Voshodna Evropa. Okay. But what is a geographical region? Sometimes it's difficult to decide whether words like "northern" make a new region (and should be capitalized), or just specify a part of a region? Not to mention that sometimes it's a matter of policy; e.g. how do you spell "Eastern Jerusalem"?
names of ethnic groups and their members: is it applied to "Baltic tribes"? "Germanic peoples"?
What about taxonomic terms in linguistics and biology? "Indo-European language family", "Slavic language subfamily", "Phylum Arthropoda" etc.
How about if you can say that this is a proper name of something, then it should be capitalized
Ukrajina - proper name of a country
ukrajinec - general notion of nationality or citizenship
names of all organizations and treaties will be capitalized, as well Krasnojarski Kraj since it's the name
but voshodni kraj if speaking of any voshodni kraj won't be capitalized, unless we're talking about some region that's called Voshodni Kraj as it's name, not a pair of words describing it
voshodni kraj if speaking of any voshodni kraj won\'t be capitalized, unless we\'re talking about some region that\'s called Voshodni Kraj as it\'s name, not a pair of words describing it
This logic I like too, but look for example at Slavic Wikipedia articles about Central Europe. Central Europe is no way oficially defined, it is actually a very vague term, yet most Slavic languages capitalise it.
Ah, but there's only one Central Europe, so you could look at it as a proper name of one specific place...
Of course, these rules are guidelines. But as long as we don't capitalize every noun it's not that bad since there is a continuum between German and Slavic capitalization with English in between. Probably it would be good to look at some prescriptive grammars and maybe get some general rules... we don't need to follow them to the letter; we can skip some of the exceptions. I don't think it's necessary to have a very large list of what should be capitalized but isn't, and vice versa. Just as long as we set some guidelines and follow them it shouldn't look too confusing. Remember, the Romans could do without all these minuscule letters.