Spellingreforms and language change

[xendula]

Originally Posted by Doitsu

More precisely, it was a coordinated effort by bored, tenured Germanists, because the unwanted reform met with great resistance and ultimately achieved very few of its lofty goals and actually added to the confusion, because it made some reformed spellings optional.

For example, one of the leading German spelling add-ons now offers a spell-check function for 5(!) different flavors of German.



BTW, nowadays the only tell-tale sign of a text in "reformed" German is the spelling of dass, which used to be written daß. ("ß" is now only used after long vowels and diphthongs.)

Many people, myself included, think that it was a way for publishing houses to make money: all school textbooks had to be replaced. I was luckily alady in college when new spelling reform was passed, but when I read how people spell in online forums today, it appears to me that they made spelling worse. Before, everybody knew exactky that you spelled "because" with ß and that there was always a comma in front of it. Now, you see it with or without the double-s, with or without the comma. It's such a mess.
And, to have various options for the same word, as is the case with so many nowadays, is just straight confusing. Whenever I look at what my nephew writes, I have no clue if he misspelled anything.

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by xendula

What makes reading Romanian online very difficult, though, is the fact that with the spread of computers without Romanian keyboard support, five letters are often replaced with their non-"accented" counterparts?

Is there no accepted transliteration? We have an issue like that with German, too, where the letters ä, ö, ü and ß are not found in 7bit ASCII, but native speakers would simply use

ae = ä
oe = ö
ue = ü
sz = ß

It's only people not familiar with the language who usually just leave out the "funny marks". In French, however, accents are usually omitted, i.e. é, è, à and ç are written as e, a and c, respectively. This can lead to some ambiguity in rare cases, but is usually not a problem.

That said, with the near-ubiquitousness of Unicode these days this is quickly becoming an issue of the past.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Is there no accepted transliteration? We have an issue like that with German, too, where the letters ä, ö, ü and ß are not found in 7bit ASCII, but native speakers would simply use

ae = ä
oe = ö
ue = ü
sz = ß

It's only people not familiar with the language who usually just leave out the "funny marks". In French, however, accents are usually omitted, i.e. é, è, à and ç are written as e, a and c, respectively. This can lead to some ambiguity in rare cases, but is usually not a problem.

That said, with the near-ubiquitousness of Unicode these days this is quickly becoming an issue of the past.

Is the use of the umlaut rather than a following "e" always optional? I notice, for example, that the name of the author, "Goethe", is always spelt in that way - I've never seen his name spelt "Göthe".

[xendula]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Is the use of the umlaut rather than a following "e" always optional? I notice, for example, that the name of the author, "Goethe", is always spelt in that way - I've never seen his name spelt "Göthe".

Goethe was his name, so we can't really change the spelling for it. Yes, you always add an e behind a,o, u if you want to indicate an Umlaut.

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by xendula

Goethe was his name, so we can't really change the spelling for it. Yes, you always add an e behind a,o, u if you want to indicate an Umlaut.

Sorry, I didn't explain that very well. What I meant was this:

If a word has an umlaut, you can always replace the umlaut with a following "e". For example, as I understand it, if a word is normally spelt with an "ö", you can always write "oe" in place of the "ö". That's right, isn't it?

Does it not work the other way around, too? ie, are you saying that you CAN'T replace an "oe" with a "ö"?

[xendula]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

Is there no accepted transliteration? We have an issue like that with German, too, where the letters ä, ö, ü and ß are not found in 7bit ASCII, but native speakers would simply use

ae = ä
oe = ö
ue = ü
sz = ß

The is no transliteration that I know of. Funny, I always use ss for ß, since that's also what I would use when capitalizing (there is no capital ß).

Unicode solves some things, especially larger newspapers now use diacritics (maybe they now have Romanian keyboards?), but most bloggers still don't.

[xendula]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Sorry, I didn't explain that very well. What I meant was this:

If a word has an umlaut, you can always replace the umlaut with a following "e". For example, as I understand it, if a word is normally spelt with an "ö", you can always write "oe" in place of the "ö". That's right, isn't it?

Does it not work the other way around, too? ie, are you saying that you CAN'T replace an "oe" with a "ö"?

We really only replace the Umlauts when the keyboard does not have them (like myself, I am writing on a US keyboard on my iPad), not in actual life, so we would not do it the other way around. The e is a placeholder for the Umlaut.

[HarryT]

Thanks - that makes sense.

The other thing I always struggled with, when I was learning German, was what the "rules" were for using a "ß" instead of "ss". I used to think that "ß" was only used after a long vowel - eg "Straße" (street), but then I came across words like "Schloß" (castle) where the vowel is NOT long. Is there any "rule", or is it simply a matter of learning which words have a "ß" and which don't?

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Is the use of the umlaut rather than a following "e" always optional?

No. Under normal circumstances, and given a contemporary text, you'd definitely use the umlaut if possible. Only if those are not available for some reason (think typewriters, later ASCII) would you fall back to this transliteration.

I notice, for example, that the name of the author, "Goethe", is always spelt in that way - I've never seen his name spelt "Göthe".

That's because he spelled it that way. No messing with proper names

[Billi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Does it not work the other way around, too? ie, are you saying that you CAN'T replace an "oe" with a "ö"?

If it is clear that the "oe" is used because the writer didn't have the letters available you can change it back to "ö" without problems.
Otherwise there may be some traps. There are a few examples where you can't replace the "oe" with an "ö" like for example in Koexistenz (you also have something like coexistence, yes?) where the o and e are two different letters.
Is it this what you were asking?

And sometimes even our holy Goethe was made into a Göthe like in a recently uploaded book here:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...d.php?t=198659

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by HarryT

If a word has an umlaut, you can always replace the umlaut with a following "e". For example, as I understand it, if a word is normally spelt with an "ö", you can always write "oe" in place of the "ö". That's right, isn't it?

As a rule, no

Does it not work the other way around, too? ie, are you saying that you CAN'T replace an "oe" with a "ö"?

It depends. Old-fashioned spellings sometimes use it, e.g. the Austrian National Bank refers to itself as "Oesterreichische (not: Österreichische) Nationalbank", and you wouldn't change that. It's rare, though.

[Billi]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Thanks - that makes sense.

The other thing I always struggled with, when I was learning German, was what the "rules" were for using a "ß" instead of "ss". I used to think that "ß" was only used after a long vowel - eg "Straße" (street), but then I came across words like "Schloß" (castle) where the vowel is NOT long. Is there any "rule", or is it simply a matter of learning which words have a "ß" and which don't?

That may have become a little bit easier with the latest change in writing. Nowadays it's only "Straße" (= after long vowels), and "Schloß" (= short vowel and end of word) has changed into "Schloss" which had the double s in its plural form "Schlösser" anyway. So, for learning it's best to remember the plural forms, too.

[rogue_librarian]

Originally Posted by xendula

The is no transliteration that I know of. Funny, I always use ss for ß, since that's also what I would use when capitalizing (there is no capital ß).

Both versions exist. The Swiss, who don't have ß, as you know, use "ss" all the time. It used to be that "SZ" was "mandatory" when wanting to use ß in capital letters, but these days "SS" is equally possible.

Originally Posted by HarryT

I used to think that "ß" was only used after a long vowel - eg "Straße" (street), but then I came across words like "Schloß" (castle) where the vowel is NOT long. Is there any "rule", or is it simply a matter of learning which words have a "ß" and which don't?

It is (was!) another rule, stating that no word must end with ss, so you always used ß instead (daß, muß, Schloß). This is no longer true, though, and these days you write dass, muss, Schloss.

[HarryT]

Thanks, everyone - very useful and interesting information .

[xendula]

Originally Posted by rogue_librarian

It used to be that "SZ" was "mandatory" when wanting to use ß in capital letters, but these days "SS" is equally possible.

I never learned it this way; it always was SS in capital letters. Maybe it differs from country to country? I went to school in Germany.