LETTER TO THE EDITOR

This reasoning is doubly fallacious. Firstly, 'Canadian,' 'French,' and many others show that English adjectives derived from proper nouns can quite well have capital letters-the assertion that they cannot is heard only in pleading for a lower-case initial for 'Arctic.' Secondly, 'Arctic' in these constructions is not an adjective, but an attributive use of the noun itself, which stands before another noun, as is common in English and some other languages, to describe it. A test for an adjective is whether a word can be used predicatively: for example, the difference between 'a small vehicle' and 'a passenger vehicle' is seen by comparing the predicative construction 'that vehicle is small' with 'that vehicle is passenger.' 'Arctic,' in the sense we mean it here, is not used predicatively: we hear for example 'those are Arctic scientists' but not 'the scientists in that group are Arctic' or 'this is an Arctic community' but not 'that community is Arctic.' When we talk about 'an Arctic scientist' or 'an Arctic community' we make direct reference to the Arctic itself, we are using not an adjective, but the noun, to describe the one or the other, and the upper-case initial is appropriate.