The Germans are so right. Nouns in a German sentence are always capitalized, thus making them easy to identify. I haven't been able to find out why they do this (after studying German for nine years you'd think I might know), but my hypothesis would be something like this: In a highly inflected language like German, where word order is not so rigid as it is in English, it is easier to parse if you have these little visual cues. German morphology is also pretty flexible, allowing verbs to become nouns without much trouble. Without the capitals, it's easy to get confused.

It's sort of like the Japanese still using Kanji even though they have two perfectly good syllabaries to work with. Syllabic structure in Japanese is very limited, so they end up with buckets of homophones. Without Kanji (it is argued) it would be more difficult to understand written Japanese. Whether I'm right about the German's motivation for capital usage or not, I agree with it whole heartedly. Here is what brought me to this place:

I was in the bathroom a few minutes ago. I found myself in a position to stare at the shelves above the toilet for a few seconds. The phrase, "Enhances well being to combat (ˈcom bat) fatigue" leapt out at me from a small vial of bath oil. I was dumbfounded. (It should be said here that I've been reading a lot of WWII history lately) What could it mean? That you'll go beyond relaxed into the realm of complete and utter fatigue? That doesn't make sense.

I burst out laughing when I realized that this was not the compound noun "combat fatigue," but a verb plus a noun. I was putting the stress in the wrong place. If we capitalized our nouns like the good Germans do, there could have been no mistake. My interpretation of the sentence would have read, "Enhances Wellbeing to Combatfatigue." It still wouldn't make much sense, but at least I would know it was the noun ˈcom bat fatigue, and not the verb comˈbat. It wasn't though.

The funny part is that the bath oil was made in Germany.