Germany seems to be in unofficial revolt against efforts by the central government to simplify language and spelling.
It is the language of Goethe, the Brothers Grimm and Bertolt Brecht. But an official attempt to reform German has provoked an unprecedented denunciation of the changes by writers, publishers and literary critics as ‘stupid and confusing’.
A committee of bureaucrats introduced the reforms – known as neue Rechtschreibung, or new spelling – six years ago to make the complex language easier to learn. […] Under the new rules, the old-fashioned double S or S-Zett in German – which looks like a fat B – has been replaced in some cases with a double ‘ss’. Other words have been capitalised for the first time, while compound verbs like radfahren – to ride a bike – have been split up, into Rad fahren.
Although the changes only affect 5 per cent of the vocabulary, they have provoked widespread confusion. They also appear to have been rejected by most Germans. But Professor Rudolf Hoberg, a member of the committee that introduced the changes, was unapologetic. ‘The changes are sensible. They make German simpler. I believe the language is substantially better off as a result.’
While the reformed spelling is Required for official documents, major magazines and newspapers have either rejected it or have called for it to be abandoned.
So, too, have, um, figures from the intelligencia and elsewhere.
Leading literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki dismissed the changes last week as a ‘national catastrophe’. In an essay, he declared: ‘Chaos has broken out … In no other major European country is the gap so deep between the language of the people and the language of literature.’
Günter Grass and other members of Germany’s literary establishment have refused to allow their books to be printed using the new forms. Even page three girls have joined the rebellion. A model called Theresa, wearing only orange knickers, told Axel Springer’s tabloid Bild she had her doubts about the wisdom of abandoning classical German orthography.
The previous German effort of this scale — which turned out to be effective — was the abandonment of the old German script typography for the more universal Roman script. That particular modernization, though, was pressed by a government official with a bit more clout — Adoph Hitler.
(via Hit&Run)
Hmmm…
Odd, since the S-Zett only confuses the Turons. “Um, I’m looking for LandwehrstraBa…do you know where it is?”
Also odd since I found German a much easier language to learn then English since German has rules…that are followed. English is just a kluge of old german/greek/latin/french/saxon languages with no rhyme or reason to it.
I took a couple of years of German in high school. While granting that English is a chaotic mess, German’s rules aren’t all that great, either — lots of highly irregular forms amongst the most commonly-used words (as one would expect), and noun gender that is, in many cases, more than a scosh arbitrary, and in all case annoying.