Posted on 08/13/2004 9:59:14 PM PDT by Stoat
FRANKFURT - Mark Twain found its rules - and exceptions - so complicated, he dubbed it "The Awful German Language." Indeed, experts have struggled to streamline Germany's notoriously difficult spelling rules. Then six years ago, German culture ministers and other German-speaking countries forged a controversial agreement.
Among other things, it replaced the idiosyncratic ß, called Esszet, with a double "s" at times. It loosened the use of commas, Germanized foreign words - so that "spaghetti" became "spagetti" and "ketchup" "ketschup" - and broke up interminable compound nouns.
The new spelling was sold in schools as a breakthrough reform. But it was detested by many intellectuals.
Still, millions of children learned the new rules, publishers reprinted all their schoolbooks and dictionaries, and most newspapers switched to the new writing style. Now, one year before it becomes irreversibly binding in the schools, the reform effort is in jeopardy.
A televised spelling blunder by Lower Saxony premier Christian Wulff revived deep resentment over the issue. After blaming his poor performance on confusing rule changes, he led an initiative to dump the reform. The ensuing debate has aroused emotional questions of money, politics, and national identity.
"It cannot be that, as a result, everyone writes as they want and that there is no accepted order any more," said Edmund Stoiber, the conservative state premier of Bavaria, one in five state premiers who wants the reform scratched. "Clarity in the German language is the core of our cultural identity. The spelling reform has brought in considerable insecurity."
The pressure to go back to the old rules intensified last week after Germany's leading publishers, Spiegel and Axel Springer, which publishes the Bild tabloid, said they'd switch to the old rules.
"We support necessary and sensible reforms in our society very strongly," Der Spiegel editor Stefan Aust and Axel Springer chief Mathias Doepfner said in a statement. "But the spelling reform isn't a reform, it's a step back. We want to help correct this mistake."
Critics argue the spelling reform was undemocratic and see it as an attack on the integrity of the German language. Recent surveys show that a majority of adults over 30 demand a reversal. "This reform has brought chaos: Nobody knows exactly how to write anymore," says Karin Pfeiffer, an author in Dueren. "People write as they want.... Children are insecure and disoriented."
But its supporters accuse intellectuals of stirring emotions because of their reluctant to adapt to new spelling rules. They say the changes make the language easier to learn and more logical. For instance, the new rules make it clear when the ß should be used. Real chaos looms, they argue, if children who've grown up learning the new rules must switch back to the old rules. Most teachers have supported the reform.
Money is at stake, too. Even though educators and school publishers have spent hundreds of millions of euros to implement the spelling changes, many have agreed to revert to the old rules.
Beyond the emotions stirred by whether kids end up writing "dass" or "daß," the debate has had another result.
"The real impact of this whole discussion is that people's interest in their language has become stronger," says Rudolf Hober, president of the Society for the German Language. "At a time when there's a feeling English is encroaching upon German more and more, the Germans have been thinking about their language more and more, and the spelling reform has played a key role in that."
German language reform isn't new. In the 1870s, Konrad Duden, the inventor of the German dictionary, wanted to democratize spelling by making written words match their pronunciation more closely. After enduring threats from Chancellor Otto Bismarck, Duden's recommendations were finally accepted in 1901 as Germany's first set of spelling rules, which reformers sought to iron out six years ago.
If the reform survives the massive protest, experts predict that Germans will slowly adjust, just as other countries have overcome spelling-reform reluctance.
The Netherlands and Spain altered their written languages to follow changing patterns of speech. Other countries were politically motivated. In Turkey, for example, President Kemal Ataturk imposed a spelling reform in 1928 as part of sweeping social and economic change to separate modern Turkey from Muslim traditions. Spelling reforms in Russia were part of a cultural reform of 1917. In 1945, the Danes got rid of capitalized nouns and introduced new characters to make Danish look less like German.
"Many writers are artists - they don't have a rational view of language," says Martin Haspelmath, a language researcher at the Max-Planck Institute in Leipzig. "They think that their words have to appear in specific forms.... They have an archaic, quasi-religious view of language, like in Islam, the Koran has to be written in Arabic."
"Linguistic rules weren't created by God," says Haspelmath. "They were created by humans, and humans have different views.
The nice thing about English is that it's non-inflected. But it's so close to German that an English speaker should have no problem with German, except for its impossible grammar. In English, for example (with a very few exceptions) people, animals and children are male or female; everything else is neuter. In German every inanimate object has a gender ascribed to it, and there are no rules for determining which gender it is, other than simply knowing it by rote.
Germans have keyboards that produce the Esszet as well as the umlauts (ä, ö, ü).
You should see a Swiss Keyboard!! They have both the german AND the french special characters on the same keys!!!
This nonsense has been going on over here for years now - it's quite silly.
There was recently a proposal to let the people decide by referendum - the gal responsible refused - commenting that the people have "more important" things to worry about a shouldn't be bothered.
Funny thing though is that, instead of "simplfiying" the rules, they have only succeeded in creating exceptions.
German used to be easy to learn because everything was spelled according to defined rules with very few exceptions. Even the adjective endings are easy if you follow ~5 rules.
Now, everything is confused.
For example, the combation "ph" (as is Physics, dolphin, etc...) is to be replaced with "f". So, "delphin" becomes "delfin", but Philisophie remains unchanged - WHY?? - because it is an "ancient" word and the reformers didn't "dare" change it!!
So, learning to spell, now becomes a matter of memory instead of a matter of pronunciation / rules.
Any modern computer can produce them even if the keyboard is not specifically set up for them.
To type letters with umlauts or accents on Windows, hold down the ALT key and then type the appropriate numbers on the numeric keypad (NOT the numbers across top of keyboard). Let go of the ALT key and the letter will then appear.
(Hold down ALT key) + 225 (Let go of ALT key) = ß
For German:
ä - 132
ë - 137
ö - 148
ü - 129
ß - 225
Ä - 142
Ö - 153
Ü - 154
For Spanish:
á - 160
é - 130
í - 161
ó - 162
ú - 163
Á - 0193
É - 0201
Í - 0205
Ó - 0211
Ú - 0218
ñ - 164
Ñ - 165
¿ -168
Windows boxes can produce that character, and I believe it's in the Macintosh character set as well, but prior to code page support MS-DOS based machines could not produce it (and even then, EGA/VGA displays could show it but CGA/MDA displays could not).
To be sure, almost all computing is done with GUI-boxes, but there are still applications that use ASCII terminals or whose character sets don't include the esszet character.
BTW, note that Alt-224 is an alpha and Alt-226 is a Gamma. What do you suppose Alt-225 might have been on the PC character set before Microsoft stuck the esszet there?
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