I like that this one is simple enough that even I, with my very terrible German, can understand it 😃
gleich
spricht
Zarathustra
Tacheles
But why is “children” capitalized?
Kinderarbeit wird im Deutschen großgeschrieben!
Because in the German language all nouns are capitalized.
Or was that a joke on children and capitalism?
Oh. So what’s the point of capitalizing things if it doesn’t help to differentiate a name from a regular noun?
What’s the point of capitalising, if it doesn’t help to differentiate a noun from other word classes?
What’s the point of capitalizing the first word of a sentence? Why are English letters pronounced differently in the same arrangements depending on the word? The language just is like that, it basically evolved over centuries to end up in this form.
Languages weren’t designed to work in a certain way, there wasn’t somebody smart saying they should work like X because Y, it’s just slow changes to how many people speak.
I’ve never once been confused about whether something is a name or a noun. It’s just not necessary.
There is some funny sentences where it matters.
For instance:
Den armen Vögeln helfen.
Den Armen vögeln helfen.
The first one means to help the poor birds, with poor as an adjective. The second means to help the poor as a noun to fuck. vögeln as a verb is slang for fucking.
Yeah, ok. I suppose that helps a bit. This kind of ambiguity exists in pretty much all languages, but good to know there’s some justification for that rule.
Who says capitalizing is for differentiating a name from a noun? maybe it’s for differentiating a noun from everything else and English is actually the one doing it wrong.
See my other comment in the thread, it applies to pretty much all languages that capitalize letters.
Well, I’m not a linguist, but I would guess because most sentences are about nouns, so recognizing who is doing what easier might be a reason.
But honestly, you are already on the wrong track if you ask for reasoning in a language. That shit is completely man made, so we could make it logical. But nooohoo, every language has so many exceptions to their rules.
It’s just so weird, I know many languages, some don’t use capitalization at all, sure, but all that do use it do it for names and start of sentences. Sometimes whether a word is a name or a noun is different from language to language (for example language names, some capitalize them, some don’t), but is a separate issue.
And languages make grammatical changes even to this day, it’s never too late to change something that has no benefit or hinders the usage.
