Drama L(L)ama
Does anyone out there remember the movie Caddyshack? Pretty silly movie, really, but one that touched my life in an unusual way. At one point, Bill Murray talks about how he once caddied for the Dalai Lama. Naturally, he mangled the pronunciation, so it came out "the Wally Lamma" (with a short a in "Lamma"). At about the same time I saw
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Your comment is most interesting, as I've noticed the same thing, but I chalked it up to unintentional evolution of the language under pressure from word processors. (Microsoft Word defaults to automatically correcting a double capital at the beginning of a word.) I had to do some research on this just now; the story is more involved. For those not familiar with Spanish: Traditionally, CH, LL and RR were considered to function as single letters ("digraphs"), and when I started learning Spanish, I learned to say their names as che, elle and erre. However, in 1994 (I'm quoting from Wikipedia here), the Association of Spanish Languages agreed to consider these pairs as separate letters for some purposes, especially alphabetization. Some Spanish speakers now, when spelling a word, will say the two letters of these digraphs separately.
Now, CH has never been capitalized together (thus, it has always been Chile and not CHile), but apparently one can still find elevators with buttons marked LLamar ("call"). I don't have enough familiarity with old Spanish texts to say how common capitalizing two initial letters was before then. (If most Spanish books from the 1800s, say, only capitalized the first letter of llama, then please ignore everything I've said. I do not pretend to be an expert on Spanish orthography.)
Intriguingly, the Spanish version of Scrabble includes one tile each of CH, LL and RR as digraphs. I don't know whether it is legal to form these combinations with two separate letters. (For you Scrabble players, note also that the Q is only worth 5 points, as Q is relatively common in Spanish, compared to English.)
Actually, there is a bit of an in-joke here: in one version of SimCity, when you click on a zoo for information the game tells you the number of "LLamas" there, with both L's capitalized. The brother and I got a kick out of that.
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With such erudite friends, I don't actually have to know anything myself. As someone wise once said, "You don't have to know it, you just have to know how to find it."
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