In the capitalizing of qualifying words we meet with many serious inconsistencies that cannot be defended or explained. We make qualifying words directly derived from proper nouns, as French, English, American, always begin with a capital. Long usage has sanctioned the rule that gives the qualifier more prominence than the noun to which it is subjected, but the rule is illogical. In the catalogues of auctioneers, and sometimes in those of merchants and manufacturers, qualifying words like French, Spanish, German, Italian, sometimes begin with a lower-case letter, and the capital is reserved for the noun. This agrees with French usage, in which language words of this description never take a capital. There are writers of good English who follow the French method in words like anglicized, romanized, frenchified, and americanized. Although not sanctioned by the dictionaries, this method is common.
Qualifiers derived from proper names and compounded with prefixes or suffixes, as in transatlantic, cisalpine, hyperborean, tropical or subtropical, herculean, plutonian, vulcanized, platonic, etc., should not have a capital.
East, West, North, South, and their compounds Northeast, etc., when used to particularize undefined geographical sections, should have a capital. When used to specify direction only (or as points of the compass), east, west, north, south, and their compounds should not be capitalized.
