ABSTRACT
On the whole, German punctuation is fairly similar to that of English: e.g. using a capital letter at the beginning of a sentence and a full stop at the end. There are, however, a couple of areas of
divergence which may cause problems for English learners of German: i) the use of capitals for nouns; ii) the use of commas:
28.1a Use of capitals for nouns
In English, capital letters are used for proper nouns (i.e. names of people, places, titles etc., e.g. ‘Mary’, ‘England’, ‘Prime Minister’) while in German they are used for all nouns (including nouns derived from other parts of speech, such as adjectives and verbs). Some examples from the text are: Sinn (2), Unsinn (3), Bücher (3), Name (4), Deutsch (4), Abend (5), Brauch (5), Nacht (6); also numerals used as nouns: Hunderttausenden (10).129
