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Comment by k07b470n | Hacker News Reader

Interesting how you write "Du" and not "du". I'm French and I've been living in Germany for 20 years. I understand and use "du/Sie" more or less appropriately (we have the same dichotomy in French). What I still cannot wrap my head around after all this time is why/when some people use "du/Du", "dein/Dein", "dich/Dich" in writing (to be clear: not at the beginning of a sentence). I guess "Du" is somewhere inbetween "du" und "Sie" on the politeness scala but I never dared to ask. I'm only using lowercase "du". What would be a rule of thumb on how/when to use the uppercase "Du"?

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"Du" and "du" are generally 100% equivalent. Regular casing-rules apply, e.g. in the beginning of a sentence it's "Du" but inside it's "du". "Kannst du mir helfen?". "Du kannst dir doch selbst helfen!"

Sometimes it's written "Du" even if in the middle of the sentence when addressing someone directly. It's technically incorrect, but it's used for emphasis and hence politeness, and that's probably where your feeling comes from.

The same can happen with other words that are getting capitalized for similar reasons, but when going strictly by the book it's grammatically incorrect. An example would be "das Große Ganze" where it should be "große" but it is capitalized to emphasize the connection/phrase.

>It's technically incorrect, but it's used for emphasis and hence politeness, and that's probably where your feeling comes from.

That's wrong, it's not technically incorrect. In fact before 2006 the only correct way to address someone personally in written form was to capitalize the Du / Sie / Ihr. Since then you are allowed to write it either way. I still use the capitalized form because I'm old and that's what I learned back in school.

Fair enough.

> Since then you are allowed to write it either way

Okay, my interpretation is that it doesn't really make sense within the language rules, so they changed it but allowed to use the old style to make the transition easier. ;-)

> I still use the capitalized form because I'm old and that's what I learned back in school.

Impossible to keep up with all the Rechtschreibreformen anyways.

Thank you and nosebear for the clarification! Now I understand better why some of my colleagues (like my boss, older) use "Du" and some don't. I'll stick to not using it, there are enough grammatic pitfalls elsewhere in the German language (not that French is any easier for foreigners, I'm sure).

I love and hate German for this; it's a language whose formal pitfalls and vagaries seem almost designed to sort people into highly-refined strata of education.

It must be so cool to see all of them "from the top" (i.e. someone who has been natively-and-highly educated, immersed in the language for their whole life); but it's from the outside it's like a fancy club that you just can't seem to get into :)

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