Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Grammer, or lack of...

Why doesn't the German language capitalize the first letter of a sentence? It looks so weird to get a letter in the mail that has capital letters on words that are in the middle of sentences. I feel like giving it to Sierra to correct for extra English homework. I think the rule is they capitalize every noun. Odd.

here is what a german Sentence would look like. (maybe) i think It is silly. why does Everyone have to be so different? why can't We all just agree to do It the same?


Of course... in Spanish you put an upside down question mark at the beginning of the question. :) This seems perfectly normal to me since I've grown up with it. ¿What do you think?

I also think that 'these are not quotation marks' like the British text books say... I say, "Michaela, use the REAL quotation marks, they are better".

AND why does Europe switch the comma and the dot in numbers? I'm finally used to it and I don't notice it now... but for a while 24,95 DKK seemed like a lot of money for a loaf of bread!! It was also pretty tricky telling my bank how much to pay people because I'd have to type 1.500,75 DKK, and it just felt wrong.

Don't get me started on the dates being reversed. Obviously you need to know the month before the day... and the year is last. My birthday is 8/27/77, not 27/8/77. But at least I can figure that one out. What about 4/6/10. Is this June 4th or April 6th? Uh oh... When I look at 4/6/10 now I guess I see June 4th. That's kinda sad... :)

5 comments:

Kelli Nørgaard said...

I would like to say "AMEN!!!" to each and every item you listed!

Anonymous said...

We need to tear it down and build a Walmart ;)

Z

Ingrid said...

Great that you sorted that out for me!!! Regarding quotation marks I know understand you use the same as we do in Sweden. I always remember myself to change my " to ' when writing in English. Now I can obviously stop doing that!
The dots and comma is SO frustrating to me too. You are write, in Swedish we write one and a half like this: 1,5 . IF we have something for separate the thousands it is a dot, but we could also just write a million like this 1 000 000 or 1000000 , with no signs at all. Actually I think that is rather good. Can't we just decide just to use a sign (dot or comma) as the decimal and no other marks?
Off to London... Have a nice weekend. Bye!

PiNG aka Patti said...

Yep, yep, yep and yep!

The German capitalization is just odd and honestly, if I had to write it, it would drive me bonkers. On the flip side, the Danes don't like to capitalize anything!

As for the commas and decimals - it drives me bonkers.

Pete said...

Nouns used to be capitalized in Denmark too, but they changed that at a spelling reform March 22, 1948.

This spelling reform was shortly after WWII had ended and a way of distancing Denmark from Germany who also capitalized nouns and still does.

So WWII was part of the reason Danish spelling rules changed.

Danish spelling reform from 1948:
http://sproget.dk/raad-og-regler/det-siger-loven/retskrivningsbekendtgorelsen-fra-1948

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