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Comment by DJohnBenton | Hacker News Reader

Somewhat related, there was also a "capitalisation shift" in the late 1600s where everyone (or their editors) started writing more nouns as capitalised (e.g. "The quick brown Fox jumped over the lazy Dog"), and then switched back in the mid-1700s. Interesting to know what might have been.

https://github.com/DanielJohnBenton/capitalisation-shift-goo...

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Donald Trump's Twitter account nearly follows this rule, but not quite:

"4.2 million hard working Americans have already received a large Bonus and/or Pay Increase because of our recently Passed Tax Cut & Jobs Bill....and it will only get better! We are far ahead of schedule." (Feb 11, 2018)

He missed "Schedule" but incorrectly capitalized "passed". Tsk.

Looks like capitalization as a general emphasis - if you just scan capitalized words:

Americans Bonus Pay Increase Passed Tax Cut Jobs Bill

Makes a good summary of the points they want to emphasize, that Americans get a bonus because the government is progressing on the Republican+blue-collar agenda.

(For when tweets are TL;DR)

Having tl;dr tweets shows how far twitter has gone from the original concept.

Missing "Schedule" isn't a big deal. During that period, English speakers didn't capitalize every noun, just the ones deemed important. Evidently Trump doesn't consider "schedule" important.

Makes sense. Trump must spend a lot of time reading 17th century classics in original editions.

Dear God am I thankful we don't do that anymore. Nothing is more annoying than hearing one's inner voice read a sentence like William Shatner

He's probably just dictating into Android's text to speech.

That doesn’t explain the often weird spelling and things like “covfefe” which must have been typed?

Yeah the random capitalization is one of the more annoying things it does.

In modern German, all nouns (but not pronouns, except for formal pronouns) are capitalized.

Didn't a German branch inherit the English monarchy in the late 17th Century? That timing would work out -- people adapting whatever style the monarchs used as the standard.

Early 18th, actually.

Elector Georg Ludwig of Hanover became King George I of Great Britain in 1714. This happened because the Act of Settlement 1701 declared Georg Ludwig's mother, Sophia, the heir to the throne (this was done specifically to cut off Jacobite claims), but she died a month before Queen Anne (which was a shame: by all accounts she was brilliant, and she was a patron of the sciences), so the throne went to her son.

Interestingly, High German also has experienced a pronunciation shift, but it was a consonant shift and came much earlier: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift

yes, one of the strangest spelling rules. Not useful at all

I remember when I first started learning German, I thought it was useless. But after getting used to it, when I switched back to English, I was like where are all the nouns? Why is everything lowercase? It's all about what you get used to, I guess.

To maximize information content (entropy), we must try to use all symbols with equal likelihood - which this rule assists, employing capital symbols with closer to equal likelihood than their usual rarity.

Furthermore, said symbols must convey previously unknown information - which this rule does not, as the nouns have the same meaning whether capitalized as not, and the "information" conveyed is redundant.

Human languages aren’t usually concerned with maximal information density though. Multiple layers of redundancy are often present. Features like noun verb agreement, grammatical gender, pleonasms, and even redundant words (last will and testament, vim and vigor etc) are used in various languages despite the redundancy, to increase clarity.

For sure, I was makimg a haphazard joke about German efficiency. Is a pleonasm an oxymoron?

Pleonasm is more of a needless redundancy like "It's déjà vu all over again."

I find noun markers to be useful in Perl. But they convey more meaning, like number.

Maybe German language should consider a syntax highlighter?

It helps with parsing and would disambiguate nouns from verbs (if German has words that are both noun and verb, as English does).

But at the same time it interferes with the parsing of sentences by making sentence beginnings less obvious when scanning.

It has many of those verb-noun pairs.

> Not useful at all

In English, nouns are often spoken with stresses in a sentence, which could make capitalizing them a pronunciation issue, just as other punctuation is (e.g. commas for pauses, question mark for changing intonation). I don't know about German, though.

Android's text to speech randomly capitalizes nouns like that.

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