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Spelling reform and the language learner | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Philological Room |  | |
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6042 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes  Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 1 of 11 14 January 2010 at 9:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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A year after I started studying German I found out about the German spelling reform. I decided to get new textbooks, dictionaries etc. so that I could learn the new spelling.
After reading a couple of articles about the reform I discovered that it is not widely accepted. For example according to wikipedia "Even six years after its introduction, 77% of Germans consider the spelling reform not to be sensible. Should I learn both the old and the new writing systems or just the new one and wait and see what happens? I've also heard that Portuguese spelling will change as well. Should I still use language learning materials that are written using the old spelling or will this end up confusing me? I guess people learning Chinese face the same problem too. Traditional or Simplified? Or perhaps both? Edited by John Smith on 14 January 2010 at 9:42am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 2 of 11 14 January 2010 at 12:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I have chosen to continue writing with the same orthography as I always have used. The new rules for splitting or merging words are just silly, and I don't want to give up writing the delicious ß (ALT + 225 on my keyboard). The three books in the series "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod" by Bastian Sick is a good source for grotesque examples of making things more complicated. If today's school children in Germany are forced to learn the new system then it may someday be more widespread, but suppose I'll be dead and gone long before that happens.
The preposed reform of Portuguese is not quite as bad, and I might give up writing a few accents because of it. And the Greek reform that threw away the two aspirations and two out of three accents was a big step in the right direction - those things were relics from a time where Byzantine scribes unsuccesfully tried to turn the wheels of language history back. If only the reform also had eliminated all vowels that sound the same (5 ways of writing /i/!) then I would have been really satisfied with it. Quite generally I prefer simple and unequivocal writing systems, even if it means that the pronunciation of one or a few dialects will determine the result and that the etymology is lost. But this is normally only accomplished if the alphabet itself is changed. In the case of English all hope is lost, - no spelling reform can save English. You need to start all over from scratch, and that won't happen. Edited by Iversen on 14 January 2010 at 12:57pm 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| John Smith Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Australia Joined 6042 days ago 396 posts - 542 votes Speaks: English*, Czech*, Spanish Studies: German | Message 3 of 11 14 January 2010 at 2:07pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Not sure why this was moved to the philological room. This thread is about general language learning.
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| cordelia0507 Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5838 days ago 1473 posts - 2176 votes Speaks: Swedish* Studies: German, Russian | Message 4 of 11 14 January 2010 at 3:57pm | IP Logged | |||||
Russian is the language for you then! Very minimalistic in terms of spelling. I particularly like the dedicated letters for the different "Sch" sounds. What, 4 or so different letters. I think they could do without the hard sign and perhaps even the soft sign and definitely add accents to the words. Other than that it's miles ahead of English for example. It's pretty easy to figure out how to write a word after you heard it.
Totally agree. As far as I am concerned this ought to disqualify English from being Lingua Franca of the world. Esperanto for the win! 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7156 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 5 of 11 14 January 2010 at 4:28pm | IP Logged | |||||
Then you most likely find the Serbian alphabets to be the closest to your ideal (if only however their conventions in general use - be they in Cyrillic or Latin - would use diacritical marks to indicate stress or pitch-accent positions, then they'd be as close to perfect as can be). 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| kf4ebp Newbie United States Joined 5605 days ago 13 posts - 18 votes Studies: English*, German | Message 6 of 11 14 January 2010 at 4:54pm | IP Logged | |||||
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For better or for worse, I am paying no great attention to the German spelling reform. I am continuing on with whatever materials I have at hand while keeping the spelling reform in the back of my mind.
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| Raincrowlee Tetraglot Senior Member United States Joined 6702 days ago 621 posts - 808 votes Speaks: English*, Mandarin, Korean, French Studies: Indonesian, Japanese | Message 7 of 11 14 January 2010 at 5:21pm | IP Logged | |||||
Then again Russian had a spelling reform in the 20th century, making the written language simpler and closer to the standard pronunciation. Any language that's had a proper reform in the last century would be better than English. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Sprachjunge Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 7165 days ago 368 posts - 548 votes Speaks: English*, GermanC2 Studies: Spanish, Russian | Message 8 of 11 14 January 2010 at 5:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
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To be honest, the thing about the German spelling reform is that most of the common reforms actually make complete sense--for the language learner. (There is one exception though: I do agree with Iversen that separating verbs previously written together is just silly, especially with the idiotic reform of the reform which now makes both forms acceptable!)
Otherwise, for a learner, I would say go with the new spelling: -It will help you with your pronunciation: You will know that "Fluss" has a short "u" because of how it's spelled. "Dass" has a short "a," so no ß for you! -Writing "Schifffahrt" instead of the old "Schiffahrt" makes a lot of sense because you are combining two words: "Schiff" and "Fahrt." Why should you suddenly drop an "f?" -And since nouns are always capitalized in German, reforming the "exceptions" of "recht haben" (it's now "Recht haben") or "infrage stellen" (it's now "in Frage stellen"), etc. makes a heck of a lot of sense to me. -Finally, depending on how many letters you write, the only other rule that usually comes up is whether to capitalize stuff like "Du" or "Dich" in letters. Haha that's the one case where I would actually go with the old way, especially if you are writing to anyone over 20. It's better to be polite than unintentionally offend someone, after all. There's a bit of minutiae after that (rauh became rau [to coincide with grau, blau, etc.], aufwendig became aufwändig [because of Aufwand]), etc. But again, for a language learner, I think going with the new spelling makes sense. No one can tell you you're wrong, and the new rules really are more consistent for someone coming in with no history of writing the language another way. 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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