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

The Gray Wizard wrote
> > From: BP Jonsson
> >
> > At 06:39 2001-05-27 -0400, The Gray Wizard wrote:
> >
> > >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?
> >
> > It is certainly not immediately clear to schoolchildren which words are
> > nouns.  I'm sure a lot of class time could be used for more
> > valuable learning.
>
>I don't know.  Given the other complexities of German nouns (gender, case,
>number), I can't imagine that capitalization rules score very high in terms
>of learning difficulties.  I can't remember any significant class time
>being
>spent on it when I studied German as an undergrad.
But you're not a native speaker, are you? To a native speaker (given that
his/her dialect isn't divergent from High German), the cases and genders
come pretty naturally. Same with the somewhat impredictable plurals. The
noun capitalization rules, on the other hand, have no real counterpart in
spoken language, and thus have to be learnt actively by even native
speakers.

                                                 Andreas

PS Obviously, the difference between higher and lower case is strictly a
feature of written language. If ease of learning were our sole motive, we'd
be busy reforming capital letters out of existence.

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