# Lower-case sentences (chatspeak)



## englishman

Many people when writing in English on net fora write entirely in lower-case e.g. "i think that the party was really cool. it went on until 2.00 am". 

I was wondering if this is ever done in German ? It's bad enough trying to read English written like this, but given that nouns are capitalized in German, it must be even more painful to read lower-case German. 

Is there a greater tendency in informal German writing to stick to more standard orthography given that case plays a more important role ? (I suspect the answer is "no" ..)


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## Hutschi

Some use lowercase writing in SMS, and some use it in a forum, too. Poets use it sometimes in poems.



> Is there a greater tendency in informal German writing to stick to more standard orthography given that case plays a more important role ? (I suspect the answer is "no" ..)


You are right.  But this is the case in the most  writing, not in all.
One of the goals of the reform of orthography was to reduce uppercase words. 
The result was that more are written uppercase.

A few people have the personal style to write all lowercase. But this is seldom now.


> I was wondering if this is ever done in German ?



It is not a new question. 

The Grimm brothers proposed to write the most words lowercase. 
See here   
http://germazope.uni-trier.de/Projects/WBB/woerterbuecher/dwb/wbgui?lemid=GA00001
Das Deutsche Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm auf CD-ROM und im Internet

This style is more than hundred years old. They begin paragraphs uppercase, (almost) all others is lowercase.


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## englishman

Hutschi said:


> One of the goals of the reform of orthography was to reduce uppercase words.
> The result was that more are written uppercase.



You have confused me here. Why did a reform of othography designed to reduce the frequency of uppercase words actually increase it ?



> It is not a new question.
> 
> The Grimm brothers proposed to write the most words lowercase.


Right. But given that modern German does, in fact, capitalize nouns, I was wondering if this was an additional psychological barrier to the use of all-lowercase sentences. In SMS, I can understand that it wouldn't be, due to the extra effort involved. I guess my reasoning is that abandoning the capitalization is a "more serious offence" in German than in English, and therefore less likely to happen.


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## sokol

englishman said:


> You have confused me here. Why did a reform of othography designed to reduce the frequency of uppercase words actually increase it ?


Well, Hutschi intended some irony here I guess.
Too many people contributed to the reforms, what actually was put into effect was only what a bunch of professors of German could agree on, which in some cases was against initial aims of the spelling reform.



englishman said:


> (...) I guess my reasoning is that abandoning the capitalization is a "more serious offence" in German than in English, and therefore less likely to happen.


This may be the case; on German forums or in chat many do not use _proper_ capitalisation and punctuation - but you don't see it that often that people write whole sentences in lower case; even people who don't begin a sentence with upper case many times nevertheless capitalise nouns.*)

But some indeed, on forums, in chat and especially in SMS, do not capitalise at all.

*) Well, having said that: they capitalise what they _think _that are nouns.


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## Kurtchen

A part of me secretly wishes for the abolition of capitalization. There, I said it  
I forget was it Glinz or some German classicist who insisted on publishing all his works in lower case only. I tried it and it really doesn't take long to get completely immersed. Writing consistently may be a different story though and harder at first.
As for the original question, the fact that people are perfectly capable and willing to communicate in this way speaks volumes.


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## berndf

englishman said:


> Is there a greater tendency in informal German writing to stick to more standard orthography given that case plays a more important role ? (*I suspect the answer is "no"* ..)


I agree. Other languages managed to abolish capitalization of nouns too without sinking into chaos, like Danish. I don't see why German couldn't do the same.

@Kurtchen: The Grimms published without capitalization of nouns. In the dictionary this has been continued by later editors. As a student I sometimes used Grimm's spelling (there are a few more differences to current spelling) for writing seminar works, just for fun. It was very easy to adapt.


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## Savra

Es gibt übrigens den Bund für vereinfachte Rechtschreibung, der sich für gemäßigte Kleinschreibung einsetzt, mit teils hanebüchenen Argumenten zwar, aber nun einmal dennoch existiert: http://www.sprache.org/bvr/bil1994.htm



berndf said:


> I agree. Other languages managed to abolish capitalization of nouns too without sinking into chaos, like Danish. I don't see why German couldn't do the same.


Die Frage ist auch weniger, ob man kann, sondern welchen Zweck das haben soll. Dank der Großschreibung, aber nicht nur wegen ihr, gehört Deutsch zu einer der leserlichsten Sprachen dieser Welt. Eine gemäßigte Kleinschreibung nützte den Schreibern, doch was ist der Sinn eines Textes, eines Buches? Ist es das Schreiben, oder ist es das Lesen? Wer sollte die Mühe haben? Der eine Schreiber oder die hundert, die tausend Leser?

Dabei ist es nicht nur die Leserlichkeit, es steigert auch die Behaltensleistung. Sogar der Schreiber hat Vorteile, denn die Großschreibung strukturiert das Denken. Das alles sind keine Behauptungen, sondern, selbstverständlich, wie könnte es auch anders sein, in der Linguistik und Psychologie gründlich untersuchte Themen.

Ob es sich ähnlich leicht gemäßigt kleinschreiben ließe wie in anderen Sprachen? Nun, das ist eine Frage, mit welcher Sprache man vergleicht und ob in ihr die Bedeutung ebenso auf den Hauptwörtern ruht wie im Deutschen. Zuvörderst steht jedoch, wie gesagt, die Frage nach dem Warum.

Warum also sollte man eine der größten Errungenschaften in der deutschen Sprache abschaffen, die sich über das Mittelhochdeutsche – Großschreibung von Namen, Ämtern, Orten – über das Frühhochdeutsche – inhaltliche Hervorhebungen durch Großschreibung – bis zur heutigen Form entwickelt hat? Einzig die Reformanten sind sehr niederträchtig und zerstörerisch an ihr Werk gegangen, denn die Großschreibung der Reform verkennt gänzlich ihren Zweck. So legt „im Folgenden“ Schwerpunkt auf ein Wort, markiert es als eine Sache, die im Satze derart unwichtig und im Hintergrunde steht, daß eine Großschreibung irritiert denn hilft. Solchem Sachunverstand darf man ruhigen Gewissens entgegentreten.

Zur Großschreibung in der dänischen Sprache gibt es übrigens eine Studie aus dem Jahre 1989 von Bock, Schweer & Hagenschneider, die zu dem Ergebnis kam: Sogar völlig ungeübten dänischen Muttersprachlern bietet die Großschreibung eines dänischen Textes nach deutschen Großschreibregeln eine Orientierungshilfe und vereinfacht das Lesen. Das Max-Planck-Institut fand weiterhin 1999 heraus, daß die Großschreibung zu weniger Fehlern führt; die Ergebnisse dieser Studie gibt es in Kurzform im Netz, doch habe ich gerade leider keinen Link zur Hand.



Hutschi said:


> But it is no noun and during the revision 2004/2006 this was fixed.
> 
> Now it is again: "Das tut mir leid."


Beides ist erlaubt, und das aus gutem Grunde, denn „das tut mir leid“ ist etwas ganz anderes als „das tut mir Leid“, in einem gewissen Sinne das Gegenteil: Bei jenem wurde das Leid einem anderen angetan, bei diesem aber einem selbst. Zweifelsfrei erkenntlich wird dies, wenn man statt _tun_ das Wörtchen _antun_ verwendet: Das tut mir Leid an.

Anbei: Das war das bekannteste, von Seiten der Reformgegner angebrachte Beispiel, nachdem diese 1996 veröffentlich wurde – obwohl damals noch sehr unausgegoren, inzwischen fast komplett überholt und wieder geändert, 2006 erneut reformiert, jedoch ohne Abschluß der Arbeit und erneut unfertig amtlichen geworden; obwohl sie sogar noch heute, nach zwölf Jahren, weitere Prüfungen und Änderungen über sich ergehen lassen muß.


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## berndf

Savra,
 
I didn't argue for or against "Großschreibung". Englishman's question was whether abandoning Großschreibung in informal written conversations, like text messaging, impairs intelligibility to a degree that German speakers are less likely to write in lower case only than speakers of other languages. I tried to give reason why I agree with him that this be probably not the case.


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## Savra

Ach, dann habe ich das alles umsonst getippt? :->


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## berndf

I am sorry.


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## elroy

In my experience, German speakers aren't less likely to write everything in lower case than English speakers or Spanish speakers or any other users of the Latin alphabet.  In other words, the proportion of those who write in standard German to those who do not is about the same as in English.  While some of those who consistently write in lower case will capitalize the occasional noun, the same happens just as frequently in English - at least in proportion to the percentage of capitalized words in the respective standard languages (in other words, it may happen more frequently in German, but only because so many more words are capitalized in standard German). 





> Is there a greater tendency in informal German writing to stick to more standard orthography given that case plays a more important role ?


 Even assuming that case "plays a more important role" in German (I'm not sure what you mean by that), I don't see what case has to do with capitalization.  Capitalization is not used to indicate case and therefore does not help the reader know what case a particular noun is in.


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## Hutschi

You can say (a little bit simplified) that the "classic" spelling helps the reader to understand the sentence. To write all lower case helps the writer, especially if he or she is not trained in typing.

In SMS it is more difficult to write at all, because one key has up to 4 codings of letters. So you have the tendency to simplify writing there.

Not very long ago in telegrams all was written either lower case or upper case (depending on the type writer) because of the restricted coding.

The idea to write almost all in lower case is old. 

---

As I already wrote, to write all in lower case is used in poetry. It gives the words more meanings. 

---


> Is there a greater tendency in informal German writing to stick to more standard orthography given that case plays a more important role?


I always wrote "Du" in letters (mails) uppercase when addressing someone. This was not standard spelling from 1996 until 2004/2006.

Many kept this writing, and now it is in the standard again. (To avoid deletion of this, I do not write where you can find information about this, because this is related to the reform.)

I knew exactly that it was not in the standard during this time, but kept this writing to show that I appreciate the other.

---

We have two different forms of "non-standard spelling" which are used more often.
1. Kleinschreibung 
(All is written lower case. Uppercase letters might be used to mark a word like bold or italic.) - this was used especially in poetry.
2. "gemäßigte Kleinschreibung"
The first letter in a sentence and proper nouns (Eigennamen) are written uppercase, similar to English.
(There are some variants of this.)

Especially the second one was used in informal writing and there was a tendency to make it standard. (I do not go further into this area here.)


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## englishman

elroy said:


> In my experience, German speakers aren't less likely to write everything in lower case than English speakers or Spanish speakers or any other users of the Latin alphabet.  In other words, the proportion of those who write in standard German to those who do not is about the same as in English.  While some of those who consistently write in lower case will capitalize



If true, that's contrary to my expectations (or maybe my hopes). I ought to start looking at some more informal German fora I guess, so I can make up my own mind.



> Even assuming that case "plays a more important role" in German (I'm not sure what you mean by that), I don't see what case has to do with capitalization.  Capitalization is not used to indicate case and therefore does not help the reader know what case a particular noun is in.


I'm afraid you've confused two meanings of "case" here; I'm referring to "letter case" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_case) not "grammatical case".


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## englishman

berndf said:


> Savra,
> 
> I didn't argue for or against "Großschreibung". Englishman's question was whether abandoning Großschreibung in informal written conversations, like text messaging, impairs intelligibility to a degree that German speakers are less likely to write in lower case only than speakers of other languages. I tried to give reason why I agree with him that this be *is*probably not the case.



That was precisely my question. I think the general response indicates that noun capitalization in German is no barrier to the use of fully lowercase orthography.


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## Hutschi

http://2037.rapidforum.com/area=201

Here you can see the  area of an informal forum of writers.
You will see, that some actually use the "all lowercase" form. ("metaphernwahn" http://2037.rapidforum.com/topic=120168757356)


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## Sepia

berndf said:


> Savra,
> 
> I didn't argue for or against "Großschreibung". Englishman's question was whether abandoning Großschreibung in informal written conversations, like text messaging, impairs intelligibility to a degree that German speakers are less likely to write in lower case only than speakers of other languages. I tried to give reason why I agree with him that this be probably not the case.


 
I feel it does impair intelligibility. People write to be read. The faster you can read an internet forum post or some other short message, the better is the chance that people actually read them.

I have probably seen a few thousand posts that I did not care to read because they started somewhat like this:

i want u all 2 no that their are good reesons 4 useing correct spelling. 

The same goes for the German eqivalents of this "style". I mean, if you take your time you can read it. But why should I. I don't know the guy and if he had something interesting he ought to make it easier to me to recognize that before I jump on to the next post.

People don't "take their time".


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## berndf

Sepia, I totally agree with you but this again was not the question under consideration. The original question was whether this style of writing impairs the intelligibility of German *significantly more* than it impairs the intelligibility of English.


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## Sepia

berndf said:


> Sepia, I totally agree with you but this again was not the question under consideration. The original question was whether this style of writing impairs the intelligibility of German *significantly more* than it impairs the intelligibility of English.


 
Exactly, and my conclusion is that it does not cause a significantly greater problem than it does in English - which does  not at all mean that there is no problem; on the contrary.


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## Frederika

englishman said:


> I was wondering if this is ever done in German?


Yes, this happens. 



> It's bad enough trying to read English written like this, but given that nouns are capitalized in German, it must be even more painful to read lower-case German.


It is. I really hate it. It looks so ugly and it so difficult to read.

Frederika


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## Kuestenwache

On the contrary it can be easier, at least for persons who are not skilled at typing on a keyboard, to write like this. As for my experience it is a matter of making a compromise between abandoning every grammatical rule per se or just using lower case for nouns. And of course using certain shortcuts has the same effect. 
Using this form of "code" to increase the flow of a conversation via chat to me is comparable to the use of shorthand in court. None the less it is unnecessary to use this when ever there is no actual conversation in progress (i.e. forum, e-mail, aso). And I have to admit it really does look horrible.


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## Frederika

Yes, of course it is easier to type -- i.e. for unskilled or lazy people. Personally, I cannot accept such behaviour, but if two people conversing are fine with it, why not? 

Kuestenwache, I don't see the similarity to shorthand. That is what abbreviations like IMO (in my opinion) do in chat speak. But disregarding capitalisation drastically reduces the reading fluency for skilled German readers. And what tops it, is using English abbreviations like IMO in German texts without capitalisation. That's almost ridiculous for me.


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## Kurtchen

If anyone gets the chance, pick up an old copy (ca. 1950) of _Lexers Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch_. The entire book is set in lower case, preface and all. Whether it was publishing policy or merely a fad I don't know, but it gives you an idea what a German scientific text can look like in proper lower case type (actually majuscules are used for emphasis) without having to resort to the nether regions of the internet, as it were. 
I for one like it


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## berndf

Kurtchen said:


> ..._Lexers Mittelhochdeutsches Wörterbuch_. ...Whether it was publishing policy or merely a fad I don't know...


Lexer used Grimms' spelling. If you look at the text, you find _masz_ instead of _Maß_. Only the Grimms used sz in antiqua typesetting. You find this normally only in Fraktur (black letter). Also in other details did Lexer follow Grimm, like in the use of italics.


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## Kurtchen

berndf said:


> Lexer used Grimms' spelling. If you look at the text, you find _masz_ instead of _Maß_. Only the Grimms used sz in antiqua typesetting. You find this normally only in Fraktur (black letter). Also in other details did Lexer follow Grimm, like in the use of italics.



Any idea if they retained this style throughout recent editions? 
Anyway, interesting tidbit I wasn't aware of


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## berndf

Kurtchen said:


> Any idea if they retained this style throughout recent editions?
> Anyway, interesting tidbit I wasn't aware of


Yes, they did. Also for subsequent deliveries of Grimms' (which has only been completed in the 1980s).


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## Sidjanga

MOD NOTE: Please stay on topic. 

The original question is:


> Is there a greater tendency *in informal German writing* to stick to more standard orthography given that case plays a more important role ?


Thanks.


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## Hutschi

I want to give a short summary of the discussions as I understand it.

1. Generally in informal writing the German stick to more standard orthography for cases.
2. Exception: in certain media where typing is difficult all lowercase is used often. Example: SMS
Also some people who have difficulties with typing prefer lowercase.
3. Exception: Some prefer either lowercase or a lowercase writing with exceptions (start of sentence, marking words, marking proper nouns). They would like to make it standard. 
4. Exception "upper case writing where lower case is standard" happened with "Du" during a period of the "Rechtschreibreform" from 1996 to 2004/2006 when lowercase was the only standard for this. This is fixed now.
5. In poesy and literature some use lowercase. (If you consider this as informal writing. I would - at least.)

---

We did not mention until now the *"Binnen-I"* in informal writing.
This is used to combine male and female words. 
Liebe Freund*I*nnen ... - this means: Liebe Freunde und Freundinnen ...
It was used during the introduction of "political correctness" and "Feminismus" but at least in the area where I live it is obsolete now.

We also did not mention *ads*. (Advertising is informal writing in some aspect. In other aspects it might be formal but these are off topic.)
In ads some prefer lower case. Some prefer an own style of cases.


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## trance0

Well, I must say I tend to stick to the formal standard when I write in German, even for informal occasions. But I have come across all variants of writing: only proper nouns capitalised, all nouns capitalised or mixed without any sense.  Even when I was chatting online through MSN with an Austrian acquaintance of mine, I tended to capitalise properly, while he mostly avoided capitalisation completely.


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## sokol

trance0 said:


> Well, I must say I tend to stick to the formal standard when I write in German, even for informal occasions. But I have come across all variants of writing: only proper nouns capitalised, all nouns capitalised or mixed without any sense.


Yes, you get that too: adjectives capitalised while nouns are not; or in the first sentence a half-hearted attempt at trying to write correctly while in the following ones most nouns or even everything is written in lower-case - written by the same person of course.


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