Why nouns capitalized german

My dear friend what a thing is the heart of man! See how the words are capitalized in German, but not in English? Das Schwimmen war einfach. The swimming was easy. Historically, German speakers, like in other languages at the time, such as English, would capitalize certain letters or words for emphasis. This system began to develop through printing processes in the 17th century. It was the practice in English for a while too, in the 16th, 17th, and early 18th centuries.

It's interesting to ponder the ambiguities that would be removed in English if we did it there too: The famed "British Left Waffles on Falklands" could be rendered as "British Left waffles on Falklands" vs.

Show 1 more comment. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Nice tidbit about Jacob Grimm. Am I the only one that has real difficulties reading that last quote? O Good that we do capitalize those words… — poke. Show 5 more comments. Note the emphasis First of all, this is because capitalisation can only happen in scripts such as Cyrillic, Greek or Latin which distinguish between capital and lower-case letters.

Jan Jan So the question is now: Why did the Germans kept the capitalization when everybody around dropped it? Add a comment. This rule helps to distinguish between sentences like this: Er verweigerte Speise und Trank. Er verweigerte Speise und trank. He refused food and drinks. He refused food and drank. The boy looks a lot like you. The boy looks like you monster. If only he were a poet.

If only it were more dense. Vor dem Fenster sah sie den geliebten Rasen. Vor dem Fenster sah sie den Geliebten rasen. Er hat in Berlin liebe Genossen. Er hat in Berlin Liebe genossen. He has dear comrades in Berlin. He enjoyed love in Berlin.

Not realy always complete sentence, but still good examples: Warme Speisen im Keller Warme speisen im Keller. Hot dishes in the cellar Gays dine in the cellar. Die Spinnen Die spinnen. The spiders They are crazy. Damaged beach chairs in my branch The damaged lie in my branch. The pure addiction to torment The naked tries to torture. Though I provide all blog content for free, your support will be very much appreciated. Skip to content. Today, there are the following 5 cases that demand us to write the words in capital letters: Capitalization at the beginning of the sentence As like as in English and most of the languages that have capital and lower case letters, you need to write the first letter of a word in capital letters if it is the first word of a sentence.

Capital letters of proper names Proper names are words that have a direct association with a thing. Capitalization of nouns In German, we write all nouns with a capital letter.

Capital letters for substantiation As in most of the languages, you can also form an adjective or a verb into a noun in German.

Conclusion about capital letters in German Now, after reading this article, you might have found out, that the rules of when to write a word with capital letters are not so complicated. Like this: Like Loading