Is it true Gemany is going through Spelling Reform now? To drop umlauts and the “ß”?
My German friends had been bragging for years that German was much better for spelling than English.
Is it prompted by use of American-style keyboards and old mainframe software that can’t sort umlouted characters?
And is it going to succeed?
I don’t know about German, but in Spanish, “ch”, “ll”, and “rr” used to be considered letters (“che, elle, erre”). They’ve since been broken up (an “ll” is now just two l’s). They’re keeping the ñ, though.
As I recall (from my ex-gf, who was a German major) they were going to drop the ess-tset entirely except in a couple of places, and they were, I think, changing something else, but I don’t remember what. These changes were supposed to have already taken place, though.
LL
I think Germany has already gone through the spelling change. They replaced the “ß” with “ss” (although I’m not sure they completely dropped the “ß” everywhere). I don’t know about the umlaut. I thought they only dropped the umlaut in certain words.
I doubt that the limitations of keyboards or computer mainframes have much to do with it. The Germans (and French, Swedes, etc.) have had their own keyboards and mainframe software for decades.
The motivation is probably logic and simplicity. After all, why use an extra character (“ß”) that no one else uses to mean “ss” and why use an umlaut over a vowel when you can express the same sound by putting an “e” after the vowel. The Germans have nearly “perfect” spelling already (i.e., if you know how a word is pronounced, you know how to spell it and vice versa) and the reasom is probably because they LIKE their language to be logical and simple. (Just like the French like their language to be “pure.”) In the middle of the century the German’s stopped using Gothic script. I don’t think it was to save on ink or reduce the workload for printers, I think they just like the simplicity.
There’s currently quite a debate over the spelling reform. Being but an unwashed foreigner, I can’t really follow the finer points (I’m counting it a success if people don’t visibly snicker at my spoken German), but the umlauts won’t be dropped. The “ß” apparently will be, although the opposition to the reform have dug up some great counterexamples, only I don’t remember them - one was a list of words that’ll end up having 3 consecutive “s”'s (what’s the plural of “s”, anyway ?) in the middle.
I’ll see if I can find an URL or 2.
S. Norman
Another foreigner checking in. Like Snorman, I’m not keeping up with the debate (it’s not like I have any say in it and frankly these things bore me), but they are still using the ess-tset and umlauts. In fact, I have in front of me a package of Knorr Fix fur Rouladen, and there are umlauts and ess-stets galore on the label.
I always thought it would be cool for us Americans to adopt the ess-tset. For a brief pretentious period in high school I did just that.
I found this from an article in the Daily Telegraph.
So I get to answer yet another question about German…
Yes, the spelling reform has already been introduced, and the spellings of hundreds of words have now been “simplified” at least in theory. In practice, many slightly “illogical” spellings have been replaced with other illogical spellings and others with the same lack of logic haven’t, if you can follow me. In other words, the reforms are neither complete nor consistent which just means that every German speaker (well writer, anyway) now has to learn all the new rules, although many people either refuse to comply or don’t seem to care that much.
The umlauts will not be changed at all.
And the beta-s rules have only be simplified, meaning that the letter will by no means be eliminated. The most important change is that they will only be kept at the end of words if the preceding vowel is long as in FuB (“Foot”)(sorry, my present location will ironically not permit me to use the real symbol, so the B will have to do.) If the vowel is short, the word is then spelled with two s’s as in Fluss (“River”). That brings the final B/ss in line with the letter in other parts of words. That’s about the main idea.
Other orthographical changes have just been silly, but I’ll let it go at that for now.
So if Germany reforms German spelling, what does this mean to Austrians, Sudeten Czechs, Germanic Swiss and other German speakers outside Germany?
Will they fall into line with the new spelling, deferring to Germany as the caretaker of its language?
Zwei Worten: Ortografische AnschluB. (Damn, I can’t find the ess-tset in my Alt+ codes.)
Hallo! It’s ALT+0223. ß. 
Of course, when I’m writing in German, I just switch to the German keyboard layout, where the ess-tset is the - key.
Ich heiße Jman!
Speaking of spelling reform, that was a typo in the title of this thread. (I meant Gernany, of course.)
I’m glad to hear they’re dropping the long compound words.
I once had to work in a German computer room and the sign on the door had two hyphens to get it all in.
Automatischerrechenmaschineraum
The last German class I took was in 1996, but since then I’ve kept up with my German through the internet exclusively.
Never noticed any sort of spelling/punctuation changes in the sites I visit. Either nobody complies or it’s too minute for me to see I guess.
Reading about how they’re replacing (or reducing) the ß, all I could think of is the reaction Americans would have to gov’t mandated replacement of ‘x’ with ‘ks’ or ‘z’.
when I was taking German back in HS, which was late 80’s, my teacher was saying even then that they wanted to fade out the esset and just use the “ss”. IIRC she said something about them just using the “ss” and leaving anything with an esset alone, ie on street signs etc. I know she didn’t care one bit if we spelled it either way. and that was the only thing I was good at in German was spelling!
The committee that decided the matter was made up of members from Germany, Austria, Switzerland and possibly one or two from Belgium, Luxembourg and Romania, but I would have to check the latter group. So no Anschluss there (and alas, no more ess-zett in Anschluss). But the letter is otherwise (in most cases) here to stay.
There were however protests in various parts of Germany, and until recently the northern German state of Schleswig-Holstein refused to go along with it. But I believe they have since lost their court case, or something of the sort.
The **ß **was always just a ligature of the two ways of making an s in “copperplate” etching. Just a fancy piece of scrollwork, like that on the hand-written Constitution, that would make John Handcock happy.
There were a lot of other ligatures that printers used since Gutenburg, like fi and ffi run-together as single letters. They were made with one keystroke on old Linotype machines. They went the way of all lead, except for rare art studio uses. No one really misses them, nor will they miss the ß when it is only used for advertising nostalgia.
Being the reckless rebel that I never bothered using the ß in the first place. No one really was bothered by it except German teachers that were born during the second Reich. Germans had gotten pretty used to seeing the “ss” replace the ß even before the offical change.
Actually I still use it in certain words because for some reason in certain cases “ss” just looks wrong.
Well, the Swiss have done away with it already, so I suppose you could too, if you like. Just don’t put it in “occasionally”, since that would of course be – terribly wrong. 
But, seriously, most Germans aren’t really used to it not being there, only the Swiss.
Actually, it’s a ligature of s and z, not two S’s. This lends it its name (ess-tset). If you’d like to be bored with more details, see this thread and skip down a bit to the ß-discussion.