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Comment by wirrbel | Hacker News Reader

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).

It has many of those verb-noun pairs.

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

> 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.

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