Re: Capitalization in German

On 2/19/2013 9:35 AM, Leif Halvard Silli wrote:
> Werner LEMBERG, Tue, 19 Feb 2013 10:48:52 +0100 (CET):
>> Otto Stoltz wrote:
>>> Here is a minimal pair to illustrate that point:
>>> Er hat in Moskau liebe Genossen.
>>> Er hat in Moskau Liebe genossen.
>>> which translates to:
>>> At Moskow, he’s got dear comrades.
>>> At Moskow, he has enjoyed love.
>> A classical joke are those two newspaper header lines:
>>
>> Der Gefangene floh
>> Der gefangene Floh
>>
>> which translates to
>>
>> The Prisoner Escaped
>> The Caught Flea
>>
>> And in this case, the prosody in German is *exactly* the same.
> So in this case, the imaginary newspapers made use of written forms
> that they perhaps would not have used orally, if instead of newspapers
> they had been Radio channels.
>
> The general subject here is the fact that “outer“ things, such as the
> (effect of the) “look“ of the language, affects on the “inner“ things,
> namely how we use the language.
In the earlier posts on the readability of road signs there was a link
to a paper that reported a research result that is interesting here.

People read more slowly when a written form has a non-standard
pronunciation (even for well-known words) and faster, when it has
standard pronunciation (even for unknown words).

The example given was "hint/ rint" vs. "pint".

Interesting that.

Also, ransom note capitalization is the hardest to read for all forms of
capitalization. Take that, CamelCase :)

A./
Received on Wed Feb 20 2013 - 08:35:41 CST