>>Ok, after having read those texts I think that it's partly a language matter. So, in English there's a distinct difference between proper nouns and common nouns, and they are well defined. But in other languages other rules apply. For example, in German ALL nouns are capitalized.
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>And how is that in Dutch? Are all nouns capitalized, or only proper nouns?

If 'proper nouns' is equal to 'proper names', then yes, we use proper names. Although... take for example my name as it is written here. The middle name 'De' must actually be 'de', so there should have been written: Peter de Valença. ( Another 'funny' thing is that I always receive e-mails from Michel Fournier that start with 'Hi Peter De'. :)

There's another reason why we have less 'propered' words. Take for example 'Cisco Networking Academy'. In Dutch that would be 'Cisco Netwerkacademie'. This was the same in German. But a couple of years ago the German government decided to use the English notation style (separate words). Many Germans don't like that new rule and an important newspaper (Bild?!) has recently decided to return to the old method. Last week I was in Germany and I noted that the Germans use the - (stripe) in multi word street names (multiwoord straatnamen), like 'Hilmar-Zonneveld-Strasse'. I must say, I like that and think we Dutch should adopt that method.

This is another example of 'propering' that we don't do in the Netherlands: I. We simply say 'ik'.


>>...Would a sentence really become less readable if most or all words were not capitalized? In case of the word Internet, would you really no longer understand what was meant?
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>For that matter, capitalization in general is a useless feature, in my opinion. We could understand everything just as well if it were written all in lowercase (or all in uppercase; the idea is to have one "version" of each letter).

I notice that you skipped the preceeding argument. You probably felt unconfortable with that one. :)