[fkistner]

Sure, languages are about communication. As long as the other person understands what you are trying to get across, you're probably fine.

However, orthography does serve an important part in getting your point across. German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure. The Umlauts serve a similar purpose to make it easier to differentiate words.

For instant messaging this probably does not matter too much, but what about books, technical reports, etc.? What's to gain from not using "proper" orthography in them, which might give the reader more hints about the sentence structure and hence its meaning?

Schöne Grüße ;)

[jacquesm]

> German for example heavily relies on capitalization (compared to e.g. English) to help the reader parse the sentence structure.

For Germans, maybe. And maybe for Germans it is a bit harder to read an English text where only proper names and the first word of a sentence is capitalized. But I routinely forget to capitalize even proper names (especially with companies, days of the week, names of months and such), and I've never felt that having upper case for the first letter of each noun made German any easier to parse, I'm mostly blind to 'case' and have to really remind myself that 'I' in English is with a capital letter.

In Dutch this is even stronger, we do not capitalize most of those except for proper names and the first letter of a sentence.

[Freak_NL]

> and the first letter of a sentence.

Except for digraph IJ, which needs both I and J capitalised, e.g., IJsselmeer.

> I'm mostly blind to 'case' […]

Most people aren't though. Leaving out capital letters where they should be jars the reader's flow. Let each language have its idiosyncrasies; it makes life more interesting.