Letter from Germany

Dieter Zimmer reports on how trivial changes to German spelling rules are causing uproar among the literati
December 20, 1996

Reading an unknown Spanish word, you know immediately how to pronounce it. Every letter corresponds to a particular sound. But with a new English word you are in a much more awkward position-the problem is summed up by GB Shaw in his remark that fish could be spelt ghoti: gh as in laugh, o as in women, ti as in motion. German lies somewhere in between. Its correspondence of letters and sounds is not as unpredictable as English, nor as consistent as Spanish. There is however no consistency even in inconsistency. We therefore have an orthographic problem.

The great writers of the 18th and 19th centuries did not. They had no qualms about spelling the same word this way in one paragraph, that way in the next. It was only when the public education system spread throughout the German-speaking countries that this beautiful chaos was no longer acceptable. Effective communication in a heterogeneous mass society demands standardised spelling. As a consequence, school orthography was born, first in Prussia in 1880, followed by Bavaria, and then the whole Reich in 1901.

The pioneers of Germanic philology in the 19th century had dreamt of a uniform orthography, but they envisaged it with an inner logic. Some wanted a word's spelling to reflect its etymology. Others advocated a clear correspondence of letter and sound. Almost all wanted to get rid of the baroque grandeur of capitalised nouns. The first orthographic conference, which met in 1876, discussed these and other ideas, but a storm of public protest protected the status quo. It has been obvious since then that German orthography would only be reformed with difficulty. Our orthography is full of inconsistencies; people do not love it, but they are fond of it, and they view any change as an attack on their innermost souls.

Just recently, it has happened again. This summer, after decades of toil, the ministers of culture, education and church affairs of the German states (and their counterparts from other German-speaking countries) replaced the old regulations of 1901 with a new standardised orthography. The innovations are so modest that the whole exercise hardly deserves the name of reform. The most visible change is that the idiosyncratic German ? (unknown in Switzerland) will now only occur after long vowel sounds: Ku? (kiss) will hence be Kuss, but Gru? (greeting) will remain Gru?. In a handful of words, a single letter will be changed, and-fear not-the capitalisation of nouns stays. The reform mainly sorts out the almost offensively messy rules regarding capital and small initial letters: nobody has ever been able to fathom why they should spell radfahren (to ride a bike) on the one hand, but Auto fahren (to drive a car) on the other. It also deals with the issue of writing separate words or one word; German is notorious for its tendency to form compound words of sometimes eccentric length, such as Handelsschiffahrtskapit??nsm?tze.

Trifling though these changes are, they have conjured up an extraordinary opposition campaign by writers and journalists-among them many well known radicals such as G?nter Grass. They have declared war against the reform in the Frankfurt Declaration, which demands its immediate withdrawal.

The points they make have come much too late and, in any case, many are based on ignorance. Some are mere oddities: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, for example, who hitherto has always been on the side of change, comes out as a sworn enemy of all spelling rules (something only for "farting couch potatoes"), having always devised his own. Yet in the same breath he fights for the old set of rules-an orthographic anarchist defending the status quo.

What are the arguments against reform? First, that reform is an offence against our cultural heritage. Those who say this have obviously forgotten that the old orthography is not the sacred achievement of the people or nation, but a system put in place for entirely practical reasons by a handful of bureaucrats in 1901.

Second, that anonymous bureaucrats and academics cannot presume to dictate in our most intimate sphere. The truth is that the freedom to deviate from authorised spelling has never been curtailed and it is not being curtailed now. The reform allows alternative spellings; it even invites people to apply orthography in a more individual way and be less dependent on authority.

Third, that the reform came as a surprise attack. In truth the proposals have been debated since 1988, and the accepted ones have been on the table and publicly discussed for a year-although not by the writers who are now protesting; the topic was much too banal for them then.

Finally, the costs. People are talking of billions, even DM 5 billion. But no publisher needs to reprint a single book. Costs will only arise for the educational publishers, who have to publish new orthographic textbooks and maybe exchange some textbooks earlier than planned.

The protests will have no effect. The ministers of culture have already declared that they do not intend to embarrass themselves by withdrawing the reform. Soon there will be peace again, and orthography will return to being the most boring subject in the world.