How To Address A Letter Going To Germany

german is one of the few languages in the world in which every noun begins with a capital letter. it’s one of the language’smost distinctive features, and it’s a little bit controversial: there doesn’t seem to be much point.

How To Address A Letter Going To Germany, of course, you can always find exampleswhere this is very important: capital letters make a huge difference,for example between ich habe liebe genossen on the one hand, and ich habe liebe genossen on the other.

but honestly, these cases are extremely rareand also very artificial: normally, nobody would ever need to say them. not all germans have beenvery happy with this system. jacob grimm complained that using capital letters for nounswas unnecessarily pedantic. a little later, the bauhaus movementasked an interesting question: why do we need two different alphabets anyway? it’s not as if we can talk in capitals. but it’s a good question:

why do we have two versions for every letter? well, the latin script came to used foreuropean languages including german, but it wasn’t always very practical. in the mediaeval period,around the time of charlemagne, for administrative purposesa different style of script was developed. this was easier to write, and much easier to read. originally, this was actually two differenttypefaces, and they were separate. it wasn’t until a bit later,during the baroque period, printers started using capital letters

in order to emphasize wordsthat they felt were important, especially nouns. over time this fashion faded, and capital letters are now usedmuch more sparingly; except in german where to this day all nouns are capitalized. there was some discussion about thisfor the german spelling reform of 1996: the suggestion was made to drop the ruleabout using capital letters for nouns. in the end, however,it was decided against this suggestion,

and so things have stayed the same as they were. so the german language is saddledwith unnecessary capital letters. or, if you prefer: the german language has retainedone of its most distinctive features. at least until the next spelling reform,whenever that is.