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?
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.
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.
Too bad it died off--would have made my job a lot easier.
Germans never pronounce a final 's' as a 'z
In general final consonant sounds are unvoiced in German.
>Too bad it died off--would have made my job a lot easier.
you obviously haven't (tried to) read Pynchon's Mason & Dixon...
Well, if you know when to init-cap a noun, you know it's a noun.