# German spelling **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [September 7, 2023, 2:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736 "2023-09-07T14:26:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2023, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736/21 "2023-09-08T11:31:35Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > Opportunity to have a question answered that has always bugged me… > > Why do some sources spell the Reichsmarshall’s name as Göring, while others spell it as Goering? In cases when you don’t have the umlauts on your keyboard or in your font, the proper substitutions are the vowel+‘e’, so ‘ö’ becomes ‘oe’, ‘ä’ ‘ae’ and ‘ü’ ‘ue’. That’s what most probably happened when you see “Göring” spelled as “Goering”. Note that in proper names, sometimes an umlaut is spelled this way by default, the most famous example being the last name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, pronounced “Göthe”. ---
**Author:** ![pulykamell](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/pulykamell/32/3166_2.png) [@pulykamell](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pulykamell)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2023, 11:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736/22 "2023-09-08T11:46:43Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > I guess if the OP is Spanish, then German might seem _slightly_ irregular, but it’s actually a LOT more phonetic than English. As pointed out upthread: you couldn’t do a spelling bee in German, it would be pointless (or at least a very, very long competition). Yeah, I can’t find a good “ranking” on the internet of phonetic languages, but German is considered pretty phonetic when it comes to spelling. I find it easy to look at a word and know how it’s pronounced as opposed to, say, in English. ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2023, 1:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736/23 "2023-09-08T13:53:06Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > Why do some sources spell the Reichsmarshall’s name as Göring, while others spell it as Goering? The ö sound is accomplished by shaping your mouth and tongue as if to make an o sound (like “oat” or “boat”) then attempting to pronounce an “e” (as in “bee” or “see”) without reshaping your mouth. Or so I was taught in beginning German. Hence it’s essentially œ or “oe” so that is often used outside of German as a substitute for the less-self-explanatory ö. ---
**Author:** ![Al128](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/al128/32/16541_2.png) [@Al128](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Al128)\ **Post date:** [September 8, 2023, 4:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736/24 "2023-09-08T16:45:13Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > In cases when you don’t have the umlauts on your keyboard or in your font, the proper substitutions are the vowel+‘e’, so ‘ö’ becomes ‘oe’, ‘ä’ ‘ae’ and ‘ü’ ‘ue’. That’s what most probably happened when you see “Göring” spelled as “Goering”. Note that in proper names, sometimes an umlaut is spelled this way by default, the most famous example being the last name of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, pronounced “Göthe”. all that and (i think) there was an old alphabet - and def. old typewriters - that did not have the Umlaut … and neither the “scharfes S” (the beta shaped letter for short-S) … and that was the standard-workaround ---
**Author:** ![Hari\_Seldon](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hari_seldon/32/5173_2.png) [@Hari\_Seldon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hari_Seldon)\ **Post date:** [September 9, 2023, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736/25 "2023-09-09T01:02:08Z")
This thread reminds me of the time I was looking in Jutland (Jylland, I think) phone directory for someone in the town of Aarhus. Now where in the alphabetical listing of the towns in Jutland would you expect to find Aarhus? It was the very last town. The reason was that it has an alternate spelling Århus and the Å is the last letter in Danish alphabet. Next to last was Aalborg. ---
**Author:** ![Mops](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mops/32/16494_2.png) [@Mops](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mops)\ **Post date:** [September 22, 2023, 10:13am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736/26 "2023-09-22T10:13:15Z")
One aspect that I’d like to mention with regard to the OP’s contention that German spelling is unphonetic: Composite words often need to be understood and correctly semantically parsed to be pronounced correctly. There are garden-path sentences in English and there are garden-path words in German. For example, to correctly pronounce _Altbaucharme_ you need to know from context that it is not _Alt-bauch-arme_ (arms of old belly) but _Altbau-charme_ (charm of old buildings). From that follows that the _charme_ part is a loan word from French, and is to be pronounced accordingly (Germans must pronounce recognizable loan words according to the origin language, or perish in the attempt). Another example is _Montage_ which is pronounced differently whether the meaning is “mondays” (pronounced as German) or “the act of assembling something” (pronounced as French albeit with the final e as schwa rather than silent) You pronounce _Erblasser_ differently depending on whether _Erb-lasser_ (male person leaving an inheritance) or _Er-blasser_ (male person growing pale) is meant. Once I **understand** a German word that I had not encountered before, there is no problem with pronouncing it. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/german-spelling/989736.md?page=1)