Matt Martin, Creative Executive of the Lucasfilm Story Group, took to Twitter this past weekend to discuss Star Wars linguistics and the general rule that sentient species are capitalized while creatures are not; so to be clear, it’s tauntaun and not TaunTaun.
If you’re wondering “why isn’t it capitalized?” first off: I appreciate you. Second, the general rule is that sentient species are capitalized while creatures are not, although “human” isn’t capitalized for some reason…
— Matt Martin (@missingwords) September 3, 2020
BTW, I posted this mostly as a joke. Not to shame people who spell made-up words wrong. I CONSTANTLY copy and paste Star Wars words to ensure I’m spelling them right because spelling is hard and Star Wars words are harder. But… pic.twitter.com/faDpSYmgIe
— Matt Martin (@missingwords) September 3, 2020
We appreciate the clarification, although Matt does acknowledge that there appears to be an exception, as human is not capitalized — go figure!
