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

From:Lars Henrik Mathiesen <thorinn@...>
Date:Sunday, May 27, 2001, 11:21
> 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