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> if only for the fact that a round-trip toUpper().toLower() will not give you back the original word.

It is an inherently destructive round trip, especially in a language that makes excessive use of upper case when comapred to english. When you have the word "wagen" did it originally refer to a "car" or did it refer to someone "trying"?

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I'm not a German speaker but this is definitely not exclusive to German nor is it caused by 'excessive' capitalization. The use of capital letters to denote nouns only helps to disambiguate it in German. While in English, this distinction is never clear just from the spelling of the isolated word alone. E.g. 'contract' can either mean 'an agreement' as a noun or 'to decrease in size' as a verb. There are plenty of other examples.

I agree though that this makes the round-trip inherently destructive.

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