To Alan Deighton:
>The question I have never found the answer to is what will happen after
the transition period to the Germans/Austrians/Swiss etc who cannot (or
will not) learn the new system. Will the old spelling be a Kündigungsgrund
for Beamte?<
The problem is that at this point in time there is no proper “new system”
in place, because the changes in dictionaries and books dealing with the
new orthography show that revisions are still under way. As long as nobody
really knows how the story ends, I suppose it suffices for most Beamten to
apply the new s-rule as a kind of ‘token gesture’.
>Will children be docked marks in the Abitur for following the old spelling?
<
In theory, yes. But I wonder if it can be justifiable to penalise students
when, in fact, all they do is follow the spelling of the “Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung” or authors such as Günter Grass, Siegfried Lenz, Günter
Kunert or Reiner Kunze whose works continue to be printed in traditional
spelling. It remains to be seen how things will transpire after
the “Übergangszeit” has ended.
>Will we find more German towns with a "Bußbahnhof"?<
According to the new s-rule, you would probably expect “Bussbahnhof”, if
anything. Misspellings of this kind have become more common, as the
alledgedly “simple” rule of putting ss after a short vowel only applies to
words that were previously spelled with eszet. But then, how can
schoolchildren know which words were previously spelled with eszet?
Ironically, it is this rule that sometimes gives people the illusion that
the “new spelling” was easy to implement.
Elke Philburn
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