The Wall Street Journal reports today that Der Spiegel and other German publishers have decided to revert to pre-1999 spelling standards, in defiance of government directives.
Well, you go, I say.
I never could understand why so many Europeans were willing to let the government tell them how to spell and what to name their children, among other things.
Maybe they were reacting to America’s Barbras, Katharines and Gennifers…
I doubt that the Wall Street Journal spells so poorly.
Of course you can argue whether a spelling reform is necessary or how you like the individual decisions, but there is a great deal of misinformation surrounding the reform.
First, it is a unified standard for schools and administration. It is not binding for publishers or citizens.
Some of the decisions might be a bit questionable, but they have been made for a reason. Basically they fall into two broad categories: Some eliminate arbitrary exceptions from rules. Those are precisely the things that people got wrong all the time anyway. Others “germanize” common foreign words. In German the pronunciation of a word can always be determined from the spelling - at least for native German words. The reform creates optional (!) German spellings so that this is also true for some common foreign words. Ok, so now students and officials are allowed to write “Nugat” instead of “Nougat” and “Portmonee” instead of “Portemonnaie” if they feel like it. Big deal.
Oh, and the old spellings are just the result of the last reform in 1901.
It is true that the acceptance of the reform isn’t very high (except those parts that people accidently used before 
) but once you look at the actual rules, you see that it isn’t such a big deal after all.
Typos in transcription.
And you’d be surprised the kind of errors you find in the Wall Street Journal. The article in question included some editors’ remarks to each other on spelling.
Can somebody give some background on this? Who mandated the spelling reform and what changes was it supposed to embody? I always thought German had the most straightforward orthography of any European language, excluding perhaps Spanish or Italian.
Oh, never mind. I missed kellner’s reply.
I’d just like to point out the following:
The Euro is a currency.
In layman’s terms, a Euro is a coin. A shiny disk worth about a dollar that’ll get you a can of soda if you hand it to the nice man in the convenience store.
Euros don’t spell. Probably can’t, to tell you the truth. In fact, European scientists have proposed the notion that that Euro coins might not even be sentient. They sure look nice, though.
The people who live in Europe are called Europeans.
We’re nice, if you catch us on a good day.
You should get to know us.
We prefer to spell all in the same way at the same time. It’s just one of the many wonderful inventions of modern Communism! Besides, who would we be to doubt the wisdom of our unelected leaders?
Grammar and spelling rules are enforced by Language Commisars who stalk the streets authorized to shoot culprits on the spot. But you knew that.
And yeah, our kids are not generally called Moon Unit or Diva or Dweezil*. But then we don’t love our children very much. Certainly not to the point of giving them a creative name that’ll give their little playmates countless hours of laughs and jokes throughout their childhood!
*Usually they’re called things like “Lenin”, “Osama”, “Pol Pot” or “Stalin”. Depending on whether it’s a boy or a girl.
Actually, the currency would be a “euro.” And “Euro” is a perfectly legitimate shortening of “European” for headline purposes. But you knew that.
And I won’t address the rest of the snark.
Let’s put it simply. Why do Europeans need government mandates on spelling and naming? Most of the world seems to get along without them. Most of us even seem to more or less agree on most spelling without the government putting in its two cents. And where we don’t, it doesn’t seem to hurt us.
As I said, we don’t. It is a guideline that is only binding for official institutions. This includes the education system. This way all students in the German speaking countries will learn the same rules in school. In your private writing you can use any spelling you like. Up to the reform this was done by declaring one particular dictionary “official” (in the sense already described,) but this preference ended with the reform.
Up to the creation of the second German empire in the late 19th century, spelling varied from state to state, but after unification efforts to harmonize the spelling started.
You don’t but you do? So far as I’m concerned what you’re describing here is a government mandate. Somehow U.S. and other countries’ school manage to publish textbooks without the national government having to choose an official dictionary.
Yes, it is a mandate, but it applies only in a limited context. Certainly we could do without it.
I’m sorry, but I don’t see what is wrong with that kind of standard.
Of course some people believe that “the Government” should restrict its role to the absolute minimum, but I don’t and thank God the majority here doesn’t either.
I don’t think I should post the complete text of the Journal article, but it offers statements that would lead one to conclude that here you have a case in which the government is setting a standard that contradicts with common practice, and that it is resulting in confusion and unnecessary cost (to government agencies and schools) with the need to republish materials with new spellings. And you have major publications deciding that they will disregard this standard, resulting in schoolteachers’ having to give up on the government-mandated standard because they can’t mark spellings wrong when they’re used in major news publications.
How has the regulatory system here resulted in something good? Wouldn’t doing the minimum have been better? If the government thought it had to set a standard, why didn’t it choose an already-existing standard – in other words choose a dictionary that was already being used by most newspapers, schools, and government agencies.
No, apparently, what happened here was more than just an agency that thought there should be some standard. It was an agency that decided that the current standard already accepted by consensus was not good enough and that it was so important to institute change that the resulting expense and confusion must be tolerated.
What was the reasonable basis for that?
They did not make arbitrary changes. Of course you can argue over the quality of the result, but the intention was to make the rules more consistent by eliminating the more bizarre special cases that serve no real pupose. There are also rules that don’t deal with spelling in a strict sense but things like punctuation.
A few examples:
Under the old rules you could never hyphenate a word between an “s” and a “t”, no matter where syllables ended, because were written together as a ligature in Fraktur. That rule was eliminated, you just hyphenate between syllables, no exception.
“ß” and “ss” are slightly different things and normally result in different pronunciation, but every “ss” at the end of a word had to be changed into a “ß” for no good reason. That was eliminated as well.
Many commas - too many for my taste - became optional.
Rules on what is written as one compound word or a series of words were simplified.
…
Of course one could have kept the old rules. The intention were just moderate simplifications in the rules taught in school. Nobody is really harmed by the change. In fact most of the differences are so subtle that people don’t even notice them (because mostly the odd things just become more regular.)
The foreign word related changes were supposed to extend the rule that every German word can be pronounced exactly as it is spelled to some words that most people don’t see as foreign any more, and those changes were all optional.
Actually there are very few real changes on individual native words, just a handful of cases were spellings that didn’t match the origin of the word were corrected.
Are you telling us that the Department of Education in a state doesn’t decree proper spelling of words? What the hell are you teaching your children?
Basically, the only difference between Germany and the U.S. in this regard is that education is a state jurisdiction in the U.S. and federal in Germany. So what?
Neither the state nor federal governments decides what spellings are correct for any purpose. So far as I know, even local school districts don’t go so far as to bother designating any particular dictionary as the arbiter of official spelling. I believe that most teachers are free to choose any dictionary as the arbiter of spelling, and most good dictionaries list all acceptable alternative spellings. So, no, neither the state or federal government decides what spellings are correct. That’s up to people to decide on their own by consensus.
This doesn’t change much but it is strictly a state-level affair in Germany as well.
Well - half sarcastic reply : We have this huge bureaucratic structure in place, and now that they’re no longer legislating our sex lives, our consumption of intoxicants, and the flashing of breasts on TV, well, they have to find some way to keep busy…
Personally I think it’s a waste of taxpayers’ money and bureaucratic talent, but then again, why wouldn’t the government handle the question of spelling ? They are a group of people that we elect and appoint to take care of the administration of public concerns - and so long as they’re not doing any harm or invading my privacy, where’s the problem ?
I’m a little more concerned when I see school boards deciding what books should or should not be on the curriculum, but even this has to be done by somebody - I prefer that somebody to be somebody I voted for.
Some more information - this has been a topic in German public debate for year.
the WSJ article is old news. The announcement by the Spiegel and Axel Springer publishing groups was 7 weeks ago. Other publishers, namely the FAZ group, implemented similar policies years ago. It is not a legal conflict either - publications can use any spelling they choose. The spelling reform standards are only binding for schools (and for civil servants when they wear their employee hat rather than their citizen hat).
the spelling reform is not the brainchild of the German federal government. It is the result of an international agreement between the education ministries of the European countries/states with German-speaking majorities (e.g. Germany/Austria/most of Switzerland) and significant minorities (e.g. Belgium, Italy, Romania…). Which is, incidentally, why an unilateral change back by the German education ministries would be problematic in international relations. The spelling reform was debated by linguists, educators and officials in conferences in the 1980s and 1990s (I distinctly recall reading about such conferences and the status of the proposals - but then I read at least one quality newspaper at the time, all except the sports pages). Those who were surprised when the agreement was first announced have only themselves to blame IMO.
correct spelling is a large influence in German culture regarding the perception of a person’s education. For someone who spells badly this will be a major detriment in their school career (affecting not only the German class grades but also tests in other subjects). This will influence the type of secondary school they can hope to be sent to as well as their further career (for all white-collar and a lot of blue-collar occupations bad spellers don’t have much of a chance of being taken on as an apprentice.) Also spelling makes a large impression with regard to informal social standing/perception of social class; when someone is seen to write poorly he/she risks to be seen as lower class (regardless of income - an obviously undereducated rich person is apt to be perceived as a rich lower-class person).
education is the responsibility of the 16 federal states in Germany. (for schools, the municipalities provide and run the buildings but the teachers are state employees). The various states do follow different policies in education but it is a commonly held view in Germany that when the states are responsible for a field of policy they have a corresponding responsibility to coordinate with each other to keep their systems compatible. Accordingly, much of education policy is implemented in voluntary consensus between the states. This way of doing things applies also to other fields of policy; in all there are almost a thousand inter-state working groups where representative of state ministries meet more or less frequently to coordinate some specialist aspect of policy or administration.
before the spelling reform was announced the legitimacy of the spelling standard was in question - people claimed that a private institution (the publishers of the Duden dictionary) did not have sufficient legitimacy to prescribe a standard on which people’s school and work careers hinged on. Now the spelling standards have at least the legitimacy of an international agreement and a resolution of the state education ministrers’ conference. This is an issue in law suits against school test scores.
Unbelievable. Let me get this straight. You live in a country where the government is banning people from marrying whomever they like, and which is slapping enormous fines on a TV network because a woman dared to bare her breast live on air – won’t somebody think of the children! Those same children who, let’s not forget, have been wrapping their goddamn *mouths * around breasts *since they were born * :rolleyes: – and you think that government guidelines on spelling are over the top?
Reality check for ascenray, please.