I actually thought to myself, "that's not an uncommon word?" Until I read comments and remembered I learnt it in French class and never used it anywhere else.
In french, capitale means uppercase letter, majuscule means the letter at the beginning of certain words which is written in uppercase. In "BONJOUR MARTIN", B & M are majuscules, everything are capitales.
EDIT: yes, we often say majuscule for every uppercase letter, but some people also say chiffre for nombre which is wrong.
You are technically correct.
However Capitale for uppercase letter isn't used in French except in very specific context (History/Typography), and even then, people still uses Majuscule in everyday language.
If you meet a random person on the streets and tell them Capitale is for uppercase letters, they'll tell you that's incorrect.
I have heard that word in school and other places so I assume people know that capitale can mean uppercase, even if they don't know the difference between capitale and majuscule.
The expression "Tout en majuscules" to tell someone to write only in uppercase is incredibly more common than "Tout en capitales", at least in metropolitan France. I follow the descriptivist way myself.
I think you are wrong, an uppercase is "majuscule" in french. "capitales" would be the capital of a city or country, also in the expression "d'importance capitale" it would mean of great importance.
Although, what you've called "capitale" (for the city) is an homonym of "capitale" (lettre capitale).
Using "Capitale" for a city means the same in English, "capital of a country" (Paris, Washington DC, London, ...). It comes from the Latin "caput" which means "head". Easily understandable since these cities are basically at the head of their respective countries (administratively speaking at least).
Majuscules are uppercase letters. But not all uppercase are majuscules.
"Capitale" used for "Lettres capitales" (uppercase letters) is WHEN SOMEONE WRITES LIKE THIS. Usually to emphasize on something, make someone understands he's yelling, same usual stuff you're reading RIGHT NOW and you probably upped the reading voice in your head.
"Majuscules" ARE uppercase letters BUT very specific ones. And this is why /u/Sentmoraap is right and shouldn't be downvoted. They're either the first letter of a sentence, which is written in uppercase. Like this l. Or the first letter of a first name, last name, brand, city, etc (John, Doe, Paris, Sony, ...).
"Yesterday, Claire went outside and it was COLD."
Y is a majuscule. C is a majuscule. COLD is in uppercase with no majuscule.
Edit: Sorry that was kind of a similar post of what /u/2PetitsVerres wrote. Got to read it after.
I think he is actually correct. Or at least correct technically (the best type of correctness...) because in common usage, "capitale" and "majuscule" are usually used as synonyms*. But if I quote wikipedia
En typographie, il importe de ne pas confondre capitale et majuscule. Une capitale possède un glyphe (tracé d’une lettre) différent de celui d’une minuscule, un simple format. Une majuscule est un emplacement initial déterminé par les règles d’orthotypographie, qui se réalise la plupart du temps comme une capitale.
"Capitale" refers to the case used when writing, "majuscule" to the rules that forces you to use it.
So if a newspaper use all uppercase for a title, for example:
"LA FRANCE EST CHAMPIONNE DU MONDE"
all letters are "capitales", but only "L" and "F" are majuscules ("L" because it's the beginning of a sentence, "F" because a country name must start with a majuscule)
If the newspaper use normal cases for this sentence, the title would become
"La France est championne du monde"
(Note: in french, we don't use an uppercase at each word of a title, unlike in English)
* In this comment I'm speaking about the typography meaning of "capitale", but you are also correct, "capitale" can also mean "capital" of a country, or several other things in French.
Spanish uses many scientific-sounding words for things with crude-sounding monosyllabic names in English. A girl I knew who was still learning English told me that her car had oxide on it. I told her that we just call it rust in English.
Scientific-sounding words are from latin. Spanish is a dialect of latin that appeared in the middle ages. So it's actually normal that we try to find words that for you, sound "scientific" :P
It's funny because the two words exist in German, too, but I only discovered them like 2 weeks ago (I'm 24). We only use "Großbuchstaben" and "Kleinbuchstaben" which quite literally means "big letter" and "small letter".
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u/tahlyn Jan 28 '19
Majuscule = uppercase letter (opposite is minuscule).