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Joined: Sep 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
With only a couple of weeks of German instruction, I don't remember much. However, I liked the capitalization rule: nouns are capitalized. I think the English-speaking peoples should adopt this rule.
Does the rule also cover compound nouns--both words are capitalized?
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Joined: Sep 2001
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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Thanks, Fal'.
I just learned that Germans never pronounce a final 's' as a 'z'...that when pronounced, the final 's' is always pronounced as an 's'. Neat. So, were there a Hans, Germans would never pronounce the name Hanz, but always Hans. This kind of very trivial information is always a delight to learn. Wish I felt that way about the Fourier series.
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
veteran
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veteran
Joined: Jan 2004
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I think the English-speaking peoples should adopt this rule.
They did, going through a period of capitalizing most nouns during the 18th century, but it's died off. The Germans also experimented with not capitalizing nouns during the second half of the 19th century, but it didn't catch on either. (I have some books using this strange orthography and they look very weird.) The Ancient Egyptians used to put a cartouche around proper names and other ancient Near Eastern languages (e.g., Akkadian or Sumerian) used particles called determinatives to indicate that a word in cuneiform was a person's or a place's name. These still get transliterated, but were probably not pronounced.
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Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Sep 2001
Posts: 6,296 |
Too bad it died off--would have made my job a lot easier.
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 13,803
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Germans never pronounce a final 's' as a 'z
In general final consonant sounds are unvoiced in German.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 10,542
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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>Too bad it died off--would have made my job a lot easier.
you obviously haven't (tried to) read Pynchon's Mason & Dixon...
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Joined: Jan 2004
Posts: 1,475
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veteran
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Posts: 1,475 |
Well, if you know when to init-cap a noun, you know it's a noun.
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