I simply misread your post as postulating a rule that a word ending in an e carries the emphasis on that e. If a word is monosyllabic, but looks bisyllabic because it ends in a silent e, that would contradict the rule that German words ending in e have the emphasis on it.
As for the German spelling reform: I very much second what has been said before in defence of it. There was a very lively debate about it in Germany at the time, with a lot of criticism. There was a heated exchange of arguments, both substantive and procedural, and many of them were, in my view, bullocks. The accusation that the reform made German spelling less consistent is not really supportable; the argument that it destroyed a tradition of German writing that has existed since time immemorial (my paraphrase of the way some opponents of the reform argued) fails on account of the fact that, historically, German has been written in many different ways and that the pre-reform rules were, in turn, the result of another spelling reform as recent as 1903. My favourite argument, however, was the position that the reform was adopted undemocratically because there was no referendum or legislative vote on it, just an agreement of the executive brances of the governments of German states and a few other German-speaking countries. There was even a complaint to the Constitutional Court on that basis, which rejected it on the simple grounds that the reform was not legally binding on anybody - it simply defined the way German was taught in schools, which is certainly within the competence of the education departments to decide. Anybody may spell any German word any way they like, and in fact a lot of newspapers still use the old rules. That’s as rebellious as we get here.
I don’t remember anything to that effect. The spelling changes do not rely on any particular dialectal preference or geographically restricted way of pronouncing words; it’s based on the pronunciation of Standard German, which is distinct from the dialects that are spoken regionally but usually remain unwritten.
The spelling reform was agreed on by intergovernmental conferences. These were mostly attended by the governments of the states of Germany (I don’t think there was significant involvement of the federal government, because education is not a matter of federal policy), but other German-speaking countries were involved as well. This certainly goes for Austria and Switzerland, to my knowledge also Luxembourg and the European countries with small but existent German minorities, such as Belgium and Italy. AFAIK even Namibia, the only non-European country with a sizable German-speaking community, participated, but the process was largely driven by Germany.
I think the fact that it has to do with vowel length is what makes it difficult, at least for native speakers of English. For the most part, I think it’s safe to say that vowel length in English is non-phonemic; i.e., the length of the /ae/ sound in “fat” or “fad” depends on whether or not it is followed by a voiced consonant. The difference in vowel length does not, by itself, convey meaning except in situations where the speaker’s ability to articulate the consonant is hampered for some reason.
Most English speakers don’t even know what vowel length really is. In the earliest year or two of school, in being taught to read, most of us are told that vowels are “long” when they are pronounced like the name of the letter–“take”, “tee”, “time”, “tone”, and “tune”, as opposed to “tack”, “ted”, “tin”, “tong”, “thud”. This is completely wrong from a phonological perspective, and certainly doesn’t translate well to other languages when we try to learn them.
When speaking a foreign language, vowel length errors usually don’t interfere that much with communication, but now that vowel length determines whether “ss” or “ß” is correct, it presents an additional bit of difficulty for us, in writing German, that we didn’t have before.
… now that vowel length determines whether “ss” or “ß” is correct, it presents an additional bit of difficulty for us, in writing German, that we didn’t have before.
[/QUOTE]
Well, we could just use “ss” everywhere, while claiming to be Swiss.
Vowel length is indeed phonemic in dialects, such as Standard American English, where interdental /t/ is rendered as an alveolar flap. Thus the only difference between, say “latter” and “ladder” is the length of the first vowel.
It doesn’t translate into German, either—when Germans speak of “long” and “short” vowels, they are speaking not just about vowel length but, as in English, about vowel quality. For example, German’s short “i” is /ɪ/, but long “i” isn’t /ɪː/; it’s /iː/.
That’s entirely possible; maybe you pronounce both as /læɾɚ/. But a lot of people (perhaps even the majority in North America) distingush /læːɾɚ/ (ladder) from /læɾɚ/ (latter). Since vowel length isn’t marked in English writing, and since it doesn’t tend to be phonemic other than for the stressed vowel with intervocalic <t>, perhaps you do make such a distinction but are not aware of it. I certainly wasn’t until it was drawn to my attention. Try asking other speakers of your dialect to pronounce the words in isolation for you (without telling you in advance which they are saying) to see if you can reliably distinguish between them. If the distinction isn’t there, or is hard to detect, for ladder/latter, try an example with a diphthong instead, such as rider/writer. You may well find a very noticeable difference between /raɪːɾɚ/ and /raɪɾɚ/.
Over here in Britain, the prestige dialect distingushes such pairs not by vowel length, but by the intervocalic consonant: /lædə/ vs. /lætə/.