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by monkey_monkey 104 days ago
What?

Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Arabic language systems don't use capital letters. They manage to parse the boundaries of sentences and thoughts just fine.

2 comments

You can find excellent examples of english written before capital letters (or even spaces) were standard and they tend to be significantly harder to parse because we're not used to parsing them. Familiarity is part of the problem but I also think that more visual clues allows for faster parsing and comprehension overall.
Different languages and cultures. When you spend a lifetime building reading clues, throwing them out the window makes it harder for people. The languages you mention also have delineation methods that involve more than simple punctuation marks.
What are the delineation methods in Mandarin and Cantonese and Hindi?
I suspect the journey to learn more on your own will inform you better than I can here on HN. Like english, they have changed over time, more often than not to include more delimiters.