me_irl

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me_irl (lemmy.world)

submitted 2 weeks ago by zedgeist@lemmy.world to c/me_irl@lemmy.world

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[–] OddMinus1@sh.itjust.works 2 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

That makes me wonder, why are there capital letters in the first place? Could we not have done fine without them? There is no reason why each sentence has to start with a capital letter, it only adds another level of complexity to the written language. Names and titles would be just fine in lower case. I can write larger letters rather than using capital letters to express loudness. "Startrek into/Into Darkness" could finally have a common consensus on correct capitalization.

Damn.

[–] antimidas@sopuli.xyz 14 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

Because of redundancy. Modern written language has a lot of features that make it easier to read, that were added as society became more literal. Things like capitalization, punctuation (a surprisingly recent addition), even separately marking vowels wasn't a given for all writing systems (see old Hebrew as an example). Capital letter in the start of a sentence saves you from picking that up from context, especially when coupled together with the stop (.) signifying the end of it. Redundancy is actually a very natural phenomenon, and spoken language has loads more compared to written examples.

It's complexity that aids the understanding, trading some of the simplicity and speed of writing to better reading comprehension. As per why capital and lowercase, in latin script capitals are derived from the letters that were chiseled, lowercase used to be just a handwritten thing. Written language naturally evolved to make use of these two systems to aid in reading. So things like capitalization are actually completely opposite from added complexity, actually making the language easier to comprehend after a bit of an initial learning curve.

[–] antimidas@sopuli.xyz 7 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

To hammer the point through here's the same comment with the "complexity" removed, a bit more akin to tokenized text:

because of redundancy modern written language has a lot of features that make it easier to read that were added as society became more literal things like capitalization punctuation (a surprisingly recent addition) even separately marking vowels wasnt a given for all writing systems (see old hebrew as an example) capital letter in the start of a sentence saves you from picking that up from context especially when coupled together with the stop (.) signifying the end of it redundancy is actually a very natural phenomenon and spoken language has loads more compared to written examples

its complexity that aids the understanding trading some of the simplicity and speed of writing to better reading comprehension as per why capital and lowercase in latin script capitals are derived from the letters that were chiseled lowercase used to be just a handwritten thing written language naturally evolved to make use of these two systems to aid in reading so things like capitalization are actually completely opposite from added complexity actually making the language easier to comprehend after a bit of an initial learning curve

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