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Comment by croemer | Hacker News Reader

Interesting that all nouns are capitalized, like in modern German and unlike in most other modern languages that use the Latin alphabet.

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Satire, Piece, and Virtues are the first Nouns that I find not capitalized. They occur within the first few Sentences, and I trust that my Observation and Diligence in this Matter might not go without Recognition.

Those are part of the modern day commentary, rather than the historic document that starts later in the article. The historic document itself seems to use capitalised nouns fairly consistently, though I haven't tried to find exceptions.

The Declaration of Independence and the original US Constitution (the main portion plus the Bill of Rights) are also written in this style, though not all nouns are consistently capitalized.

I was curious, so in case anybody else was, the first printed versions of these documents also retain this style. It wasn't just a habit of handwriting.

It’s not uncommon for the time. E.g. “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…”

That's great to learn. A a German native speaker I have a tendency to write like that even though I know it's wrong. Good to know at least it would have been correct at some point in time :D.

If anything, the more capitalizations the more presidential the writing becomes, e.g.

> 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…

Reads just like Trump's tweets

That's the joke

THANK YOU for your attention in THIS matter

As non German native speaker, that lives and works across DACH space, speaks the language, what I hate is the AI learning from Android phones ortography correction, that after a while think that all words have to be capitalized when I am writing in other languages.

Now, we can't even get people to capitalize proper nouns to disambiguate soil from a planet.

or engineers from Engineers

In a some sense that goes back to the roots, as you can't distinguish these in German either ("Erde" is always capitalized)

You're forgetting English is a far more confusing and ambiguous language.

"English" may mean a subset of British people, a language, or sometimes a restaurant MacGuffin, whereas "english" refers to only vertical spinning of a billard ball.

“The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” ― James D. Nicoll

“ And so, from hour to hour, we ripe and ripe. And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot”

I would secretly hope Harbrace printed no further editions and kids and crims didn't invent new cant. The only constants are change, death, taxes, the ineffective shrieking about the impending rhyming of history caused by dangerously-stupid leaders, and the co-evolution of language and culture.

(buffalo) ^ 8

Decreasingly so, but even in stuff written in the last hundred years or so you'll sometimes find words capitalized for emphasis or similar.

Most communication from the highest office in the land is indeed now In this Exalted STYLE.

Famously Custer used to capitalize mule and horse and write Indian in lowercase

It's not all nouns. Capitalization was a form of emphasis back then.

Capitalizing nouns was more of a stylistic convention back then

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