I grew up in a bilingual home. I sometimes refer to what I speak and write as Germish.
I routinely have to look up "Is that one word or two?" because German runs words together so much more often than English and I capitalize too many things because German capitalizes all nouns and English only capitalizes proper nouns.
A friend of mine once described my capitalization choices as "raising my voice," a place between "speaking normally" and the internet "yelling" of writing in all caps.
In German, admittedly, my mother's tongue, I have to actually think about how to capitalize, so capitalization slows me down. So while I capitalize, I make a lot of mistakes and I don't really care.
However, in English, capitalization is so easy. Even as a foreigner, I look at all-lowercase text and feel awkward.
>”I capitalize too many things because German capitalizes all nouns and English only capitalizes proper nouns.”
I’ve gotten into a particularly bad habit of capitalizing nouns haphazardly and I don't speak any German. I think it’s from programming becuase it happens very often in my Code Comments.
Thank you [see what I did here :)] for pointing this out - I'm not native and on top of that used to learn german (never went anywhere with it, but the capitalization of every noun somehow stayed with me longer than necessary).
Add english oddities such as capitalizing first person pronoun (which I do, as you probably noticed) and it's kinda easy to be oblivious that I do this.
Based on his name I'm guessing his first language is German. He's accustomed to capitalizing all nouns instead of only proper nouns as we do in English.
Off topic, but capitalizing words in titles in English really bothers me. Every word in the title are nouns, but some are here ment to be verbs. In German for example, only the nouns would have been capitalized, making the title much easier to read.
I find the noun capitalization in German nice because there's no ambiguity about whether you should capitalize. Whereas in English we capitalize "proper names" but it's not always clear what is a proper name, and I always have to look up if you're supposed to capitalize things like prepositions in movie titles.
> German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure.
For Germans, maybe. And maybe for Germans it is a bit harder to read an English text where only proper names and the first word of a sentence is capitalized. But I routinely forget to capitalize even proper names (especially with companies, days of the week, names of months and such), and I've never felt that having upper case for the first letter of each noun made German any easier to parse, I'm mostly blind to 'case' and have to really remind myself that 'I' in English is with a capital letter.
In Dutch this is even stronger, we do not capitalize most of those except for proper names and the first letter of a sentence.
Haha. Sometimes i do also think about this being a choice on that, but it's more a post hoc ergo propter hoc thing. The original reason is mostly that i rarely ever capitalize anything. :)
Many times I've started writing something I intend to be a single sentence so I'll be lax about capitalization. Then I realize a second sentence is warranted so I go back to fix things and carry on. IM really is an odd medium.
In this context, the German use of caps is interesting. They capitalize every noun, and I believe that such a use has been proven to allow for speedier reading than the capital use in other Western languages (i.e. English).
To all of you - I'm used to capitalization (very much since I'm German and we capitalize every Noun), much less though do I know what to capitalize in English (I got so much angry comment in my phase of capitalizing everything i deemed important that I completely converted to an all-lower-case style).
I also know everything about punctuation, having taken two typing courses and one in standardized letter writing.
Despite all that, since I'm using CamelCase a lot and my shift keys have suffered from that so much that I have to press them forcedly, I try to limit their use whereever possible (this location just opted out of it ;).
What kind of capitalisation convention is that? It's not German, or all the nouns would have been capitalised. Prepositions and conjunctions, with verbs and pronouns some of the time?
I routinely have to look up "Is that one word or two?" because German runs words together so much more often than English and I capitalize too many things because German capitalizes all nouns and English only capitalizes proper nouns.
A friend of mine once described my capitalization choices as "raising my voice," a place between "speaking normally" and the internet "yelling" of writing in all caps.
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