4 ms·

yes, one of the strangest spelling rules. Not useful at all

keeganjw 9y ago
I 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 ago
  To 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 9y ago
    Human 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 9y ago
      For sure, I was makimg a haphazard joke about German efficiency. Is a pleonasm an oxymoron?
      - mishac 9y ago
        Pleonasm is more of a needless redundancy like "It's déjà vu all over again."
kolpa 9y ago
It helps with parsing and would disambiguate nouns from verbs (if German has words that are both noun and verb, as English does).
- Tomte 9y ago
  It has many of those verb-noun pairs.
- cimmanom 9y ago
  But at the same time it interferes with the parsing of sentences by making sentence beginnings less obvious when scanning.
labster 9y ago
I 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.

I 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 ago
To 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 9y ago
  Human 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 9y ago
    For sure, I was makimg a haphazard joke about German efficiency. Is a pleonasm an oxymoron?
    - mishac 9y ago
      Pleonasm is more of a needless redundancy like "It's déjà vu all over again."

kolpa 9y ago

It helps with parsing and would disambiguate nouns from verbs (if German has words that are both noun and verb, as English does).

Tomte 9y ago
It has many of those verb-noun pairs.
cimmanom 9y ago
But at the same time it interferes with the parsing of sentences by making sentence beginnings less obvious when scanning.

labster 9y ago

I 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.