German Language
Spelling Changes Approved
as on 1998
Latest Update: 19 August 1996 (Links updated)
The following is the text of a message sent by Bob Madler to his Banat Mailing List
Genealogy Society. We understand it is based on the text of the GERMAN
NEWS, an Interent Online News publication:
"It took ten years of fiddling to plan the spelling reform - today (on 2 December 1995) the
states' ministers of education decided to have it take place on 1 August 1998, provided their
premiers also agree. There were some last minute discussions, e.g. if there should be a
German way of spelling French or Greek words (that was defeated).
Restaurant will not be spelled with an 'o', and catastrophy will keep the 'ph'. The reform
was meant to make spelling easier and the state premiers think that they have got it
right.
The general idea is to use more compound words (less hyphens) and more upper-case than
lower-case. 100 orthographic rules of a total of 205 are to go, and the existing 52 rules on
commas are to be reduced to nine. And there will be no more 'sharp' s (looks like a Greek
beta): it will be abolished!
There will be a period of grace of 10 years. Until 2005 schools will not mark down 'old'
spelling yet term it 'obsolete' and amend it accordingly. The state premiers plan to sign off
the new rules until spring and then sign treaties with Austria and Switzerland to finalise
reforms.
The 'sharp' s is a bit of a rarity - only ever used in lower-case, though some
typesetting-systems' style-sheets (such as LaTeX2e's) provide for both.Switzerland never had
a 'sharp' s: they always used 'ss' instead; and Austria always used 'sz' instead of the 'sharp'
s.
Swiss typewriters have to be able to handle (at least) French as well: they regularly sacrifice
*upper-case* umlauts to accents, so 'Aegeri' has no dots on the A, whereas 'aergerlich' has
got them. DE-NEWS (in English) has no beef with any of that: as there are no standard rules
for either umlauts or 'sharp's in international e-mail we always were ahead of our
time
For subscription informaytion to daily German News, send a
message to DE-NEWS-Request@vm.gmd.de
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