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I have an iPhone with the latest iOS (10.1) and I have both an English and Spanish keyboard enabled. The autocorrect is helpful in most cases and generally good for Spanish. However, I've noticed that since the last update, iOS is now capitalizing "buen día" as in "Buen Día" no matter where in the sentence you use it. I have no idea why this is the case and think it may be an error on Apple's part.

Can anyone think of a reason why "buen día" would be capitalized in every instance?

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  • What about buenos días?
    – Rafael
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 1:12
  • @Rafael what about it?
    – Unknown Coder
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 1:24
  • They are nearly complete equivalents. Does your autocorrect capitalize it? That may be an easy workaround
    – Rafael
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 1:53
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    This is, in my opinion, a horrific error in Apple's part. I called and yelled at them about this last week after months of putting up with the inconvenience. I'm a native Spanish speaker, and see NO reason whatsoever for the keyboard to auto-capitalize things like "Buen Día", "El Centro", "El Barrio", "La Luz", etc. Keep posting about this online, perhaps Apple will listen and fix it!!!
    – NatuScape
    Commented Mar 6, 2017 at 12:54
  • @NatuScape I'm glad I'm not the only person that is annoyed by this :-) However, I think that Apple is usually painfully slow to deal with items like this. I am not optimistic that it's something that will be fixed soon.
    – Unknown Coder
    Commented Mar 7, 2017 at 19:42

2 Answers 2

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If both initials are capitalized no matter where the expression is, then that's two mistakes. And if the i in Dia is not accented (í), then it's yet another mistake. None of them are grave but they're clearly unacceptable in an operating system, and worse in an autocorrect feature. (Is it possible that the autocorrect has learned this?)

The following is anecdotical, but: there is a tendency in some Spanish speakers to capitalize certain words and expressions when they needn't be. For example, people sometimes capitalize the names of the days of the week and the months of the year (which is the rule in English but is wrong in Spanish). In certain contexts you might find capitalization employed as an emphatic mark, much like double quotes.

Here are the usage rules for uppercase letters acording to the Real Academia Española (in Spanish); section 6 (the last) deals with cases where capitalization is explicitly forbidden.

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  • The i in Dia is accented, I just dont have that on my physical keyboard. So it's only one mistake, but a serious one and extremely annoying when you go to use it and insists on correcting it
    – Unknown Coder
    Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 22:44
  • @DMS If you have Ubuntu you can reconfigure your keys to type those extra Spanish letters rather easily. Not sure about Mac or Windows.
    – pablodf76
    Commented Jan 16, 2017 at 22:51
  • I edited the question to add the accents in día.
    – fedorqui
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 7:11
  • Also, I do think that this was just a bad translation in which they used the English Capitalize all proper nouns style, which does not apply to Spanish.
    – fedorqui
    Commented Jan 17, 2017 at 7:40
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This is more a comment than an answer, but here it goes

It is probably an iOS error, since unless it is the first letter of a sentence or the first letter after the . only theB should be capitalized.

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