(09-17-2014, 11:24 PM)Sounsyy Wrote: EDIT for clarification:
(09-17-2014, 10:59 PM)Faye Wrote: Grammatically, there's no reason they should be capitalized. Human is never capitalized. You rarely see elf or dwarf or halfling or anything of that sort capitalized, because why would it be? It's a species, not a race. We don't capitalize "dog" or "cat" or any animal species. As far as grammatical correctness goes, there's no reason at all to capitalize it.
Correct, elves and dwarves and other fantasy peoples from Tolkien's tales are separate species from humans, hence why they are not capitalized. We know this because the elves leave Middle Earth to mankind. The term "mankind" not including them.
However, in FFXIV, the umbrella of mankind does encompass Elezen, Miqo'te, Lalafell, Roegadyn - not just Hyur. See: "Age of Man" or when Titan calls us all indiscriminately "Children of Man." (Note: These two phrases in quotations are proper and capitalized because they are the proper name of an Era, like the Renaissance, and a proper title respectively.)
This tells us in XIV lore, Miqo'te are actually not a separate species. We are all one species, mankind, with a bunch of radical racial divisions. So grammatically, yes, race names should always be capitalized.
I'm not sure that's an accurate comparison, though. Is Titan calling all the races "Children of Man" any different than an alien landing and calling us all "earthlings?" The Primals are from another plane of existence, beings with immense power that are an entirely different form of life. It could simply be he's using the phrase the same way a God-like being may refer to "mortals"--a manifestation of life far different from his own, easily lumped into the same category by someone looking down on them, but not necessarily in fact the same species.
![[Image: NCtCate.png]](http://i.imgur.com/NCtCate.png)
