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Somewhat related, there was also a "capitalisation shift" in the late 1600s where everyone (or their editors) started writing more nouns as capitalised (e.g. "T
by DJohnBenton 9y ago
Somewhat related, there was also a "capitalisation shift" in the late 1600s where everyone (or their editors) started writing more nouns as capitalised (e.g. "The quick brown Fox jumped over the lazy Dog"), and then switched back in the mid-1700s. Interesting to know what might have been.
https://github.com/DanielJohnBenton/capitalisation-shift-google-ngrams#the-great-capitalisation-shifts https://github.com/DanielJohnBenton/capitalisation-shift-goo...
- thescriptkiddie 9y agoIn modern German, all nouns (but not pronouns, except for formal pronouns) are capitalized.
- wirrbel 9y agoyes, one of the strangest spelling rules. Not useful at all
- keeganjw 9y agoI remember when I first started learning German, I thought it was useless. But after getting used to it, when I switched back to English, I was like where are all the nouns? Why is everything lowercase? It's all about what you get used to, I guess.
- hyperpallium 9y agoTo maximize information content (entropy), we must try to use all symbols with equal likelihood - which this rule assists, employing capital symbols with closer to equal likelihood than their usual rarity. Furthermore, said symbols must convey previously unknown information - which this rule does not, as the nouns have the same meaning whether capitalized as not, and the "information" conveyed is redundant.
- mishac 8y agoHuman languages aren’t usually concerned with maximal information density though. Multiple layers of redundancy are often present. Features like noun verb agreement, grammatical gender, pleonasms, and even redundant words (last will and testament, vim and vigor etc) are used in various languages despite the redundancy, to increase clarity.
- hyperpallium 8y agoFor sure, I was makimg a haphazard joke about German efficiency. Is a pleonasm an oxymoron?
- mishac 8y agoPleonasm is more of a needless redundancy like "It's déjà vu all over again."
- kolpa 9y agoIt helps with parsing and would disambiguate nouns from verbs (if German has words that are both noun and verb, as English does).
- labster 9y agoI find noun markers to be useful in Perl. But they convey more meaning, like number. Maybe German language should consider a syntax highlighter?
- vorg 9y ago> Not useful at all In English, nouns are often spoken with stresses in a sentence, which could make capitalizing them a pronunciation issue, just as other punctuation is (e.g. commas for pauses, question mark for changing intonation). I don't know about German, though.
- cimmanom 9y agoDidn't a German branch inherit the English monarchy in the late 17th Century? That timing would work out -- people adapting whatever style the monarchs used as the standard.
- amyjess 9y agoEarly 18th, actually. Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover became King George I of Great Britain in 1714. This happened because the Act of Settlement 1701 declared Georg Ludwig's mother, Sophia, the heir to the throne (this was done specifically to cut off Jacobite claims), but she died a month before Queen Anne (which was a shame: by all accounts she was brilliant, and she was a patron of the sciences), so the throne went to her son.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- misja111 9y agoInterestingly, High German also has experienced a pronunciation shift, but it was a consonant shift and came much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift
- pavlov 9y agoDonald Trump's Twitter account nearly follows this rule, but not quite: "4.2 million hard working Americans have already received a large Bonus and/or Pay Increase because of our recently Passed Tax Cut & Jobs Bill....and it will only get better! We are far ahead of schedule." (Feb 11, 2018) He missed "Schedule" but incorrectly capitalized "passed". Tsk.
- amyjess 9y agoMissing "Schedule" isn't a big deal. During that period, English speakers didn't capitalize every noun, just the ones deemed important. Evidently Trump doesn't consider "schedule" important.
- kbutler 9y agoLooks like capitalization as a general emphasis - if you just scan capitalized words: Americans Bonus Pay Increase Passed Tax Cut Jobs Bill Makes a good summary of the points they want to emphasize, that Americans get a bonus because the government is progressing on the Republican+blue-collar agenda.
- gwbas1c 9y agoAndroid's text to speech randomly capitalizes nouns like that.