When you look at texts written in English in the 17th or 18th centuries, you'll see that all the nouns are capitalized. We still do this in titles, but back in the day you also saw it in written text and now it comes off as a typographical peculiarity. Today, German still capitalizes its nouns, but as far as Latin-alphabet languages go, it's a bit of an outlier in that respect.
When did English stop capitalizing its nouns in standard text? Was there an orthographic reform? Were people trying to distinguish themselves from foreigners? And why is the pronoun I the sole exception?
Hi there!
This question is really interesting but as a historically focused sub, you might want to also try /r/AskLinguistics for more linguistically focused answers.
Thank you!
A better question might be "when did English start capitalising nouns for the sole purpose of conceptual emphasis?" The reason and circumstances for this practice's abandonment are clear, and rather uninteresting (i.e., it was never based on any clear categorical distinction or rule which might be generalised, and did not reflect prior English usage). The notion collapsed under the flimsiness of its own premises. The reasons for its adoption, on the other hand, are actually worth investigating.
As to that, it can best be explained as a stylistic fad, probably imitative of continental practices (in a time where print traveled across borders and seas so much more readily than once it did), which emerged amidst the relatively chaotic orthographic developments of the early modern age of print. As I say, it did not reflect any prior scribal tendency, and nor did it persist into late modernity. Just a novel stylistic notion (that capitalisation helpfully emphasised semantically important nouns) which came into fashion, but fell out of favour for the excessive vagueness of its essential premise (which necessitates one decide which words are semantically important, after all).
From The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, p. 67:
The fashion was at its height in the later 17th century, and continued into the 18th. The manuscripts of Butler, Traherne, Swift, and Pope are full of initial capitals. However, the later 18th-century grammarians were not amused by this apparent lack of order and discipline in the written language. In their view, the proliferation of capitals was unnecessary, and causing the loss of a useful potential distinction.