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Comment by susi22 | Hacker News Reader

In German (and other languages) you capitalize every noun. When I was younger I found it confusing that English didn't do that. It seems that this kind of syntax highlighting allows your brain to read text a little bit faster since it instantly knows that this will be a noun. It's also a little annoying if people write German and don't properly capitalize, your brain just doesn't expect the word to be noun if it's not capitalized.

* http://www.ruediger-weingarten.de/Texte/Capitalization.pdf (pg 4ff, last paragraph)

* https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2013/papers/0462/paper0462.pd...

* http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/699/does-capi...

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English used to do this. You can still see evidence of it in things like the US Constitution, where the capitalization seems random until you remember English is a Germanic-family language and did this as recently as a couple hundred years ago:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America

All legislative Powers herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.

The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

etc.

Why is "defence" not capitalized then? A typo?

That was bothering me too.

At least, it is not a typo from ubernostrum, it's spelled "defence" in the original [1].

Moreover that's the British spelling of defense (is there a link with the lack of capital?).

Also note that, instead of "Blessings", it is "Bleſsings" in the original. But they are roughly equivalent if you apply a compatibility decomposition in your unicode normalization (NFKD/NFKC).

So where is the edit button for that constitution? Or do they only accept pull requests?

[1] http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/charters_downloads...

Someone asked the same question here

https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-word-defence-the-only-uncap...

but at least in my browser, I can't see the actual answer (it says "2 Answers" but I can only see one, which just confirms that the word is not capitalized).

Maybe defense is considered active in a way that Welfare and Tranquility are not?

"common defense" is being used as an elision of "common defense of the People". The entire phrase is a noun phrase. But " defense" is a verb within the noun phrase.

In primary school, I was taught to capitalise nouns in titles.

So, an essay title might be "The Man and his Dog" rather than "The man and his dog".

But that rule doesn't apply only to nouns: it applies to all words that aren't pronouns, conjunctions and articles. Hence, "To Kill a Mockingbird" ('kill' is a verb), "Malone Dies," etc.

That rule (the one I learned in primary school) does apply only to nouns. I'm not suggesting my primary school teacher's rule is the correct, most popular or best rule :)

Personally, though, I find many US newspapers' headlines jarring due to excessive capitalisation.

There isn't one uniform rule for headings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case#Headings_and_publi...

Other languages also have more complex inclination and declension rules that add additional structure. (And for writing systems, c.f. the use of hiragana in Japanese for things like particles and verb endings).

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