Re: Speedwords hare (was: Some new Brithenig words? Narbonosc

> Date:         Sun, 27 May 2001 06:39:20 -0400
> From: The Gray Wizard <dbell@...>
>
> > From: BP Jonsson
> >
> > Of course it would be a benefit if German abandoned capitalization of
> > nouns.  It would make it more like other languages written in
> > Roman script!
>
> Benefit to whom?  In what way would changing their language to "make it more
> like other languages" benefit Germans?  What might motivate them to make
> such a change on this basis?
I'm not sure B.Philip said it would or should. However, I think it
would in fact be a benefit to learners, both to children learning to
write in primary school, and to people learning German as a second
language.

For the second group, there would of course not be a problem if most
other languages did it the same way --- but that's hardly a benefit to
the Germans, I don't think the capitalization rules will make much
difference to the number of people choosing to learn the language.

German, like English and the Scandinavian languages, can easily use
adjectives as nouns and bleach nouns of their full nouniness; the
rules for when something is 'really' a noun and should be capitalized
are an orthographical convention and sometimes does not agree with the
Sprachgef