There's a lot of ambiguity and corner cases about what's a noun in German when you drill down to it (It maybe doesn't seem a problem coming English because you don't have to decide every time you write a word whether it's a noun or not). And Germans in highschool are drilled in this apparently, so many grow to hate it a bit. For example, take 'ein Paar'\'ein paar' (a pair) - in english you say oh pair is a noun so great. But in german whether you write it big or small depends on whether you're using it as an indefinite pronoun or a noun. You can apparently use it to distinguish a pair of trousers (in Paar Hosen) from a pair of trousers (ein paar Hosen), though don't ask me which is which...
And there are some fossilised expressions where even though things are nouns they're written small (e.g. 'durch dick und dünn' (through thick and thin.) ), and there are cases of capitalising things that sure look like adjectives though...I don't know how linguistics classify the parts of speech formally...
Or another example - if say "I take part" ("ich nehme teil") in something, is 'part' a noun? The german sentence is a word-for-word translation of the english, and 'Teil' is a noun in german (meaning 'part'), but you don't capitalise it because teil is part of the verb 'teilnehmen' and not independently a noun in this context.
(here's my personal menagerie of capitalisation rules for German: https://gist.github.com/increpare/b5d652b535656b794c47a77c1d... , and here's a relevant page (in German) by Duden, one of the two main authorities on German orthography - https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/rechtschreibregeln/Groß-%2... . It's not a short page, and not something that comes intuitively to people. They learn this stuff).
All that said, I like German orthography! I enjoy compound words and (plus or minus edge cases) its approach to capitalisation.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries when German was still a lingua franca of various scientific fields (linguistics, archaeology), it actually was the practice of some writers outside Germany to not capitalize nouns. One sees this in many German-language scholarly publications from Sweden and Finland, for example.
If it's any consolation, in my experience, no two native English speakers can agree on where and how often commas are needed either.
Also I think there is a ruleset that is just not really applied by most. That is problematic because it allows for people without good intentions to be strict marking up some students while being lenient with others (a double standard situation).
Swiss Standard German got rid of ß :)
i.e. "Fuß" vs swiss "Fuss"
Swiss spelling makes it appear as if "Fuss" (with a long u) could be pronounced like "Nuss" (with a short u), whereas standard German "Fuß" is clear on that.
Prior to the German spelling reform, Nuss was also written "Nuß" and back then the swiss way of spelling had the appeal of avoiding an extra character that is specific to the german language (and wasn't found on french typewriters for example).
What I meant was a spelling like "Fus, Füse, Nuss, Nüsse" but "Gras, Gräzer" (instead of Gras Gräser).
z would be the soft s-sound represented by s in traditional german spelling. s would be the hard s sound represented by ß or s in traditional german spelling.
Luckily for shell scripting, $ is unshifted (shifted would be £. I far prefer USD GBP CHF etc.)
(nonante-neuf > quatre-vingt-dix-neuf. Fais-moi changer d'avis :-) )
Just match how you talk with how you write, and it reads very naturally.
* You do not capitalize Nouns in your Sentences which is means I don't have to analyse the lexical Structure of a Sentence while writting stuff.
Stuff that is hard in English but rarely talked about because of the prominence of the phonetics-vs-traditional spelling:
* hyphenation (fairly complex, basically one needs to look it up or rely on tooling in english, rarely taught). * punctuation, especially placement of commas * capitalization in headings (a bit confusing, conflicting recommendations)
Oh and as for german there are a lot of strange things buried in what superficially looks like a fairly ok system.
* Typically you can infer from the roots of a word whether to spell with `e' or `ä' (i.e. schälen (to peel) is spelled with ä because it stems from Schale [peel]). But for some words that doesn't apply, for example Mehl (flour) is related to `mahlen' (to grind), but not spelled "Mähl". * Auslautverhärtung is not spelled out but implied. I.e. Hund (dog) is kind of pronounced as if it would end with a -t ("Hunt"), whereas "Hunde" (dogs) has a soft d sound. Turkish makes such things explicit (compare `kitap` and `kitabi`). If we went down the turkish route, we could introduce a soft-s and hard-s distinction in the alphabet (maybe z vs s) and get rid of the `ß/ss` mess. * `sch` should be replaced by Ş, w -> v (with existing spellings of v being replaced by f where necessary ("von" -> "fon"), z -> "ts", etc.
There is an obscure swiss organisation promoting a spelling reform for German(that differs from my suggestions) https://www.ortografie.ch
Its focus is a lot on vocal lengths and capitalization. Kind of interesting stuff (that will never make its way into the maintstream).