"A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue"

http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/proposal.html

Swift was apparently serious about this, as he was not in _A Modest
Proposal_.

He wasn't the first.
"The Royal Society set up a committee in 1664 for 'improving the English
language', and they explored the idea of an Academy. It came to nothing..."

As did Swift's and many other proposals. The same attitudes exist today
(English is going to hell), as one can see from letters to the editor
and the like, but nobody imagines that a single authoritative body could
be established, or would do any good.

Ar an tríú lá is fiche de mí Feabhra, scríobh Ross Clark:

> "A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue"
>
> http://andromeda.rutgers.edu/~jlynch/Texts/proposal.html
>
> Swift was apparently serious about this, as he was not in _A Modest Proposal_.

https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E700001-017/text001.html loads for me today,
where the Rutgers site doesn’t.

Am very entertained by:

“Instances of this abuse are innumerable: what does your lordship think of the
words drudg’d, disturb’d, rebuk’d, fledg’d, and a thousand others everywhere to
be met in prose as well as verse? where, by leaving out a vowel to save a
syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have
often wondered how it could ever obtain.”

Consonant clusters, what a tribulation.

> He wasn't the first. "The Royal Society set up a committee in 1664 for
> 'improving the English language', and they explored the idea of an Academy.
> It came to nothing..."
>
> As did Swift's and many other proposals. The same attitudes exist today
> (English is going to hell), as one can see from letters to the editor and the
> like, but nobody imagines that a single authoritative body could be
> established, or would do any good.

It *could* be established, if publishers co-operated, ideally internationally.
That would be their own best interests since international standards would
theoretically drive down their copy-editing costs even further. There is some
instinct to standards, idiosyncracies in spelling are not actually that
tolerated.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

On 2024-02-23, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:

> “Instances of this abuse are innumerable: what does your lordship think of the
> words drudg’d, disturb’d, rebuk’d, fledg’d, and a thousand others everywhere to
> be met in prose as well as verse? where, by leaving out a vowel to save a
> syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have
> often wondered how it could ever obtain.”
>
> Consonant clusters, what a tribulation.

I think he's objecting to an ongoing change of his time where -ed /əd/
loses the schwa?

> It *could* be established, if publishers co-operated, ideally internationally.
> That would be their own best interests since international standards would
> theoretically drive down their copy-editing costs even further. There is some
> instinct to standards, idiosyncracies in spelling are not actually that
> tolerated.

The problem isn't that English spelling lacks standardization, but
that without an authoritative body it has become impossible to
change the standard.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

On 2024-02-26, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> On 2024-02-23, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:
>
>> “Instances of this abuse are innumerable: what does your lordship think of the
>> words drudg’d, disturb’d, rebuk’d, fledg’d, and a thousand others everywhere to
>> be met in prose as well as verse? where, by leaving out a vowel to save a
>> syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have
>> often wondered how it could ever obtain.”
>>
>> Consonant clusters, what a tribulation.
>
> I think he's objecting to an ongoing change of his time where -ed /əd/
> loses the schwa?
>
>> It *could* be established, if publishers co-operated, ideally internationally.
>> That would be their own best interests since international standards would
>> theoretically drive down their copy-editing costs even further. There is some
>> instinct to standards, idiosyncracies in spelling are not actually that
>> tolerated.
>
> The problem isn't that English spelling lacks standardization, but
> that without an authoritative body it has become impossible to
> change the standard.

Oh, English has plenty of standards. There's the American one, the
common British one, the Oxford University Press one, the Australian
one (which I think is mostly but not entirely like the British
one). Canadian spelling is somewhere between American & British. I'm
not sure if New Zealand has a distinct one from the others.

There's no way you could get most British people to switch to American
spelling (even though it's somewhat simpler & easier) --- they are
snobby enough about things like "math".

So clearly we need a new universal standard that everyone is equally
grumpy about.

<https://xkcd.com/927/>

--
If hard data were the filtering criterion you could fit the entire
contents of the Internet on a floppy disk. ---Cecil Adams

On 2024-02-26, Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:

>> The problem isn't that English spelling lacks standardization, but
>> that without an authoritative body it has become impossible to
>> change the standard.
>
> Oh, English has plenty of standards. There's the American one, the
> common British one, the Oxford University Press one, the Australian
> one (which I think is mostly but not entirely like the British
> one). Canadian spelling is somewhere between American & British. I'm
> not sure if New Zealand has a distinct one from the others.

Yes, and the biggest part of the divergence is due to the reform
efforts of one Noah Webster and the fact that--absent an authoritative
body--those changes didn't penetrate all of the English-speaking
world or were even rolled back. (Look up the history of why the
Australian Labor Party is spelled that way.)

It usually takes the whole first chapter for me to notice whether
a book is typeset according to US or UK spelling. It's not very
salient.

> There's no way you could get most British people to switch to American
> spelling (even though it's somewhat simpler & easier) --- they are
> snobby enough about things like "math".

Wasn't there some carfuffle a few years back because some British
Royal (then-Prince Charles?) used an -ize spelling somewhere and
much of the British audience thought this an Americanism, since
your average Brit doesn't read any OUP publications, I guess.

The fairly minor modernizations of the French (1990) and German
(1996) orthographies also triggered major outcries. People react
with kneejerk refusal without even knowing what it is that they are
against. That's one for the psychologists. It's as if people feel
that something is taken away from them. Very odd.

--
Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de

On 2024-03-01, Christian Weisgerber wrote:

> On 2024-02-26, Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:

>> There's no way you could get most British people to switch to American
>> spelling (even though it's somewhat simpler & easier) --- they are
>> snobby enough about things like "math".
>
> Wasn't there some carfuffle a few years back because some British
> Royal (then-Prince Charles?) used an -ize spelling somewhere and
> much of the British audience thought this an Americanism, since
> your average Brit doesn't read any OUP publications, I guess.

I don't recall, but I'm not surprised.

> The fairly minor modernizations of the French (1990) and German
> (1996) orthographies also triggered major outcries. People react
> with kneejerk refusal without even knowing what it is that they are
> against. That's one for the psychologists. It's as if people feel
> that something is taken away from them. Very odd.

I think people who are good at the existing system have an ego stake
in maintaining it. People who know you're supposed to write (in BrE)
"colourful" but "coloration" can feel superior to those who don't.

--
You could tell by the way that he talked, though, that he had gone to
school a long time. That was probably what was wrong with him. George
had been wise enough to get out of school as soon as possible. He
didn't want to end up like that guy. [A Conf. of Dunces]

Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote or quoted:
>I think people who are good at the existing system have an ego stake
>in maintaining it. People who know you're supposed to write (in BrE)
>"colourful" but "coloration" can feel superior to those who don't.

You are full of it when you portray those who support
the retention of normal spellings (the majority of the
population, including many experts, who gave good reasons for
their opinion) as mentally disturbed. Maintaining the normal
spellings is what everyone usually does, for good reasons.

There may be something to that ego stake. A secretary may be
proud of the fact that she can type so quickly. But this is
no argument for changing the position of the keys.

Around the year 2000, the school ministers of the federal states
of the Federal Republic of Germany decided that various normal
spellings of words in schools should now be regarded as errors.

Today, children generally make many more mistakes than before
this change in schools.

1972 7
2002 12
2012 17

Error rates according to the Giessen longitudinal study
("Gießener Längsschnittstudie")

Some want to explain this by the idea that people generally
learn less well today. However, it turns out that the mistakes
are made precisely where changes have been made:

"Comparable spelling performance with words not directly affected
by the spelling reform contrasts with significantly poorer
performance with the s-words that were changed by the reform.",
quoted (translated to English) from: "Rechtschreibleistung
vor und nach der Rechtschreibreform: Was ändert sich bei
Grundschulkindern?" ("Spelling performance before and after the
spelling reform: What has changed for primary school children?");
by Harald Marx; University of Bielefeld; 1999

But there is no need to argue any further here, because the school
ministers have long since recognized their mistakes!

"The education ministers have long known that the spelling
reform was wrong." said Johanna Wanka (President of the
"Kultusministerkonferenz" [The so-called "conference of
school ministers"] in 2005)

"We should not have made the spelling reform." said Hans
Zehetmair (a former supporter of the reform) in 2003, as
Bavarian Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs.

Ar an cúigiú lá de mí Márta, scríobh Stefan Ram:

> Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote or quoted:
> >I think people who are good at the existing system have an ego stake
> >in maintaining it. People who know you're supposed to write (in BrE)
> >"colourful" but "coloration" can feel superior to those who don't.
>
> You are full of it when you portray those who support
> the retention of normal spellings (the majority of the
> population, including many experts, who gave good reasons for
> their opinion) as mentally disturbed. Maintaining the normal
> spellings is what everyone usually does, for good reasons.
>
> There may be something to that ego stake. A secretary may be
> proud of the fact that she can type so quickly. But this is
> no argument for changing the position of the keys.
>
> Around the year 2000, the school ministers of the federal states
> of the Federal Republic of Germany decided that various normal
> spellings of words in schools should now be regarded as errors.
>
> Today, children generally make many more mistakes than before
> this change in schools.
>
> 1972 7
> 2002 12
> 2012 17
>
> Error rates according to the Giessen longitudinal study
> ("Gießener Längsschnittstudie")
>
> Some want to explain this by the idea that people generally
> learn less well today. However, it turns out that the mistakes
> are made precisely where changes have been made:
>
> "Comparable spelling performance with words not directly affected
> by the spelling reform contrasts with significantly poorer
> performance with the s-words that were changed by the reform.",
> quoted (translated to English) from: "Rechtschreibleistung
> vor und nach der Rechtschreibreform: Was ändert sich bei
> Grundschulkindern?" ("Spelling performance before and after the
> spelling reform: What has changed for primary school children?");
> by Harald Marx; University of Bielefeld; 1999
>
> But there is no need to argue any further here, because the school
> ministers have long since recognized their mistakes!
>
> "The education ministers have long known that the spelling
> reform was wrong." said Johanna Wanka (President of the
> "Kultusministerkonferenz" [The so-called "conference of
> school ministers"] in 2005)
>
> "We should not have made the spelling reform." said Hans
> Zehetmair (a former supporter of the reform) in 2003, as
> Bavarian Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs.

I’m surprised at the increase in mistakes, I found the post-1996 spelling
agreeably consistent when I learned German from 2002 onwards, but I have no big
stake in this.

I found that surname odd, but on further investigation it’s fairly
unremarkable in its etymology;

»Benennung nach Beruf zu mittelhochdeutsch zehende , zehente , zēnde , zehent
‘der zehnte Teil, besonders als Abgabe von Vieh und Früchten’ und
mittelhochdeutsch meier , meiger ‘Meier, Oberbauer’ für einen Meier, der von
den umliegenden Höfen den Zehnten (ein Zehntel der Erträge) einsammelt und
aufbewahrt, möglicherweise auch für einen zehntpflichtigen Meier.«

https://www.namenforschung.net/dfd/woerterbuch/liste/?tx_dfd_names%5Bname%5D=36096&tx_dfd_names%5Baction%5D=show&tx_dfd_names%5Bcontroller%5D=Names&cHash=437cefeca931c60cf7e69d0c19a7d1b2#s_dbd8ba8c-5461-4814-8f53-f5d5794e9748

So a tithe collector.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote or quoted:
>I’m surprised at the increase in mistakes, I found the
>post-1996 spelling agreeably consistent when I learned German
>from 2002 onwards, but I have no big stake in this.

In normal German, syllables that end with the sound /s/ can
be written with "s" or "ß" at the end. An example would be
the words "das" and "daß".

(A sequence "ss" in words such as "Wasser" is analyzed as
"Was|ser", with one "s" ending the first syllabe and the
next "s" starting the second syllable.)

The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/
possible endings for syllables ending with the sound /s/:
"ss", "s" and "ß"; for example, "dass", "Bus", and "buß".
Things have become more complicated, and writers have to
think more about spellings. Indeed, Marx has found that
pupils today make more mistakes regarding such words.

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>"ss", "s" and "ß"; for example, "dass", "Bus", and "buß".

"Buß" is a noun (so, I should have written "Buß"), a variant of
"Buße" (repentance). Today, it is more common as a syllable in
words such as "Bußgeld" or "Bußtag".

On 2024-03-05, Stefan Ram wrote:

> Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote or quoted:
>>I think people who are good at the existing system have an ego stake
>>in maintaining it. People who know you're supposed to write (in BrE)
>>"colourful" but "coloration" can feel superior to those who don't.
>
> You are full of it when you portray those who support
> the retention of normal spellings (the majority of the
> population, including many experts, who gave good reasons for
> their opinion) as mentally disturbed. Maintaining the normal
> spellings is what everyone usually does, for good reasons.

Mentally disturbed is something of an exaggeration. All I meant was
that some educated poeple are resistant to change for that reason.

> There may be something to that ego stake. A secretary may be
> proud of the fact that she can type so quickly. But this is
> no argument for changing the position of the keys.
>
> Around the year 2000, the school ministers of the federal states
> of the Federal Republic of Germany decided that various normal
> spellings of words in schools should now be regarded as errors.
>
> Today, children generally make many more mistakes than before
> this change in schools.
>
> 1972 7
> 2002 12
> 2012 17
>
> Error rates according to the Giessen longitudinal study
> ("Gießener Längsschnittstudie")
>
> Some want to explain this by the idea that people generally
> learn less well today. However, it turns out that the mistakes
> are made precisely where changes have been made:
>
> "Comparable spelling performance with words not directly affected
> by the spelling reform contrasts with significantly poorer
> performance with the s-words that were changed by the reform.",
> quoted (translated to English) from: "Rechtschreibleistung
> vor und nach der Rechtschreibreform: Was ändert sich bei
> Grundschulkindern?" ("Spelling performance before and after the
> spelling reform: What has changed for primary school children?");
> by Harald Marx; University of Bielefeld; 1999
>
> But there is no need to argue any further here, because the school
> ministers have long since recognized their mistakes!
>
> "The education ministers have long known that the spelling
> reform was wrong." said Johanna Wanka (President of the
> "Kultusministerkonferenz" [The so-called "conference of
> school ministers"] in 2005)
>
> "We should not have made the spelling reform." said Hans
> Zehetmair (a former supporter of the reform) in 2003, as
> Bavarian Minister of Education and Cultural Affairs.

--
A person who won't read has no advantage over one who can't read.
---Mark Twain

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/

The word written "Meßſtelle" 100 years ago, in the schools
today is spelled "Messstelle" with three "s". The "ß" clearly
marked the end of a syllable, and "ſ" the beginning of a new
syllable, even though both share the same pronunciation.

A "Messer" is a knife, and "Meß-" means "related to a measurement".
A "Meßergebnis" is a "measurement result". Today, in the schools, it
has to be written "Messergebnis". The ending of the syllable is not
marked anymore and starting to read it, a knife might come to mind.

(Also note the /s/ sound at the ending of "Meßergebnis" which follows
a short /i/ sound and is spelled "s".)

Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote or quoted:
>Mentally disturbed is something of an exaggeration. All I meant was
>that some educated poeple are resistant to change for that reason.

The abstraction "change" might not be appropriate when the details
of the change are crucial.

"We will reduce your salary." - "No, I'm against that!" - "Oh,
you're just old-fashioned, out of habit against any innovation!"

The crucial thing is not that the salary is "changed", but that
it's /reduced/. The worker might not be against a /raise/ of his
salary.

In other words, in the case of a regulation according to which the
common spellings are to be regarded as errors in schools, one must
take the trouble to look closely at what is to be changed and how.

Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
> On 2024-03-05, Stefan Ram wrote:
>
>> Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote or quoted:
>>> I think people who are good at the existing system have an ego stake
>>> in maintaining it. People who know you're supposed to write (in BrE)
>>> "colourful" but "coloration" can feel superior to those who don't.
>>
>> You are full of it when you portray those who support
>> the retention of normal spellings (the majority of the
>> population, including many experts, who gave good reasons for
>> their opinion) as mentally disturbed. Maintaining the normal
>> spellings is what everyone usually does, for good reasons.
>
> Mentally disturbed is something of an exaggeration. All I meant was
> that some educated poeple are resistant to change for that reason.

What you actually did was to add insult to injury.

Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>>Mentally disturbed is something of an exaggeration. All I meant was
>>that some educated poeple are resistant to change for that reason.
>What you actually did was to add insult to injury.

And then one could just as well cite psychological mechanisms at
work on the part of some of the proponents of the new rules: If a
teacher or pupil is forced by the school to write in certain ways
that are actually bad, a cognitive dissonance arises ("I do it,
but it's bad."), which the teacher or pupil resolves by convincing
himself that this new way of writing is actually quite good.

ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
>And then one could just as well cite psychological mechanisms at

And then there also might be a "meta-bias" at work, which I came
up with myself, but which might also already have been described
in the literature:

We tend to see rational processes as explaining our own views,
whereas we tend to see emotions or bias as the reason for other
people's views where these views are not acceptable to us.

Let me search for similar biases in the Web:

|The /bias blind spot/ is the cognitive bias of recognizing
|the impact of biases on the judgment of others, while failing
|to see the impact of biases on one's own judgment.¹
....
|In a sample of more than 600 residents of the United States,
|more than 85% believed they were less biased than the average
|American. Only one participant believed that they were more
|biased than the average American.

. I also find a Web page with a paragraph similar to my thoughts
(especially the final two sentences starting with "Both ..."):

|We suffer from bias blind spot, a cognitive bias where we are
|quick to point out the impact of biases on others' judgments.
|Yet, we do not give much thought to the effects of our own
|biases. This bias is similar to naïve cynicism and naïve
|realism, which stem from a higher opinion of oneself than
|reality. Both are grounded in the belief that we see things
|objectively and others do not. So, we tend to think that the
|people who disagree with us are uninformed, irrational, or
|biased. [2]
....
|[2] Benson, B. (2016). Cognitive bias cheat sheet. Better Humans.

¹ Wasn't there something attributed to Jesus?

On 2024-03-01 20:03:49 +0000, Christian Weisgerber said:

> On 2024-02-26, Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com> wrote:
>
>>> The problem isn't that English spelling lacks standardization, but
>>> that without an authoritative body it has become impossible to
>>> change the standard.
>>
>> Oh, English has plenty of standards. There's the American one, the
>> common British one, the Oxford University Press one, the Australian
>> one (which I think is mostly but not entirely like the British
>> one). Canadian spelling is somewhere between American & British. I'm
>> not sure if New Zealand has a distinct one from the others.
>
> Yes, and the biggest part of the divergence is due to the reform
> efforts of one Noah Webster and the fact that--absent an authoritative
> body--those changes didn't penetrate all of the English-speaking
> world or were even rolled back. (Look up the history of why the
> Australian Labor Party is spelled that way.)
>
> It usually takes the whole first chapter for me to notice whether
> a book is typeset according to US or UK spelling. It's not very
> salient.
>
>> There's no way you could get most British people to switch to American
>> spelling (even though it's somewhat simpler & easier) --- they are
>> snobby enough about things like "math".
>
> Wasn't there some carfuffle a few years back because some British
> Royal (then-Prince Charles?) used an -ize spelling somewhere and
> much of the British audience thought this an Americanism, since
> your average Brit doesn't read any OUP publications, I guess.

Yes, you're right. There is absolutely nothing unBritish about -ize
spellings. I don't know why so many people think there is. I always use
-ize, and usually it avoids getting "corrected" by half-educated
sub-editors.
>
> The fairly minor modernizations of the French (1990) and German
> (1996) orthographies also triggered major outcries. People react
> with kneejerk refusal without even knowing what it is that they are
> against. That's one for the psychologists. It's as if people feel
> that something is taken away from them. Very odd.

--
Athel -- French and British, living in Marseilles for 36 years; mainly
in England until 1987.

5 Mar 2024 09:33:08 GMT: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) scribeva:

>Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote or quoted:
>>I’m surprised at the increase in mistakes, I found the
>>post-1996 spelling agreeably consistent when I learned German
>>from 2002 onwards, but I have no big stake in this.
>
> In normal German, syllables that end with the sound /s/ can
> be written with "s" or "ß" at the end. An example would be
> the words "das" and "daß".
>
> (A sequence "ss" in words such as "Wasser" is analyzed as
> "Was|ser", with one "s" ending the first syllabe and the
> next "s" starting the second syllable.)
>
> The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/
> possible endings for syllables ending with the sound /s/:
> "ss", "s" and "ß"; for example, "dass", "Bus", and "buß".

Yes, and consistently corresponding with long and short vowels. Which
is quite handy, especially for non-native speakers like me.

> Things have become more complicated, and writers have to
> think more about spellings. Indeed, Marx has found that
> pupils today make more mistakes regarding such words.

The new system for s/ß is simpler, more consistent and easier to
learn.

--
Ruud Harmsen, https://rudhar.com

Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com> wrote:
> 5 Mar 2024 09:33:08 GMT: ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) scribeva:
>
>> Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote or quoted:
>>> I’m surprised at the increase in mistakes, I found the
>>> post-1996 spelling agreeably consistent when I learned German
>>> from 2002 onwards, but I have no big stake in this.
>>
>> In normal German, syllables that end with the sound /s/ can
>> be written with "s" or "ß" at the end. An example would be
>> the words "das" and "daß".
>>
>> (A sequence "ss" in words such as "Wasser" is analyzed as
>> "Was|ser", with one "s" ending the first syllabe and the
>> next "s" starting the second syllable.)
>>
>> The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/
>> possible endings for syllables ending with the sound /s/:
>> "ss", "s" and "ß"; for example, "dass", "Bus", and "buß".
>
> Yes, and consistently corresponding with long and short vowels. Which
> is quite handy, especially for non-native speakers like me.
>
>> Things have become more complicated, and writers have to
>> think more about spellings. Indeed, Marx has found that
>> pupils today make more mistakes regarding such words.
>
> The new system for s/ß is simpler, more consistent and easier to
> learn.

Many natives claim that the long/short distinction IN THIS CASE is a matter
of spelling pronunciation, which may be welcome to nonnatives but not for
natives.

Ar an cúigiú lá de mí Márta, scríobh Stefan Ram:

> Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote or quoted:
> >I’m surprised at the increase in mistakes, I found the
> >post-1996 spelling agreeably consistent when I learned German
> >from 2002 onwards, but I have no big stake in this.
>
> In normal German, syllables that end with the sound /s/ can
> be written with "s" or "ß" at the end. An example would be
> the words "das" and "daß".
>
> (A sequence "ss" in words such as "Wasser" is analyzed as
> "Was|ser", with one "s" ending the first syllabe and the
> next "s" starting the second syllable.)
>
> The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/
> possible endings for syllables ending with the sound /s/:
> "ss", "s" and "ß"; for example, "dass", "Bus", and "buß".
> Things have become more complicated, and writers have to
> think more about spellings. Indeed, Marx has found that
> pupils today make more mistakes regarding such words.

And you don’t mention the upside of the reform, which was more internal
consistency regarding whether a double or a single consonant should be written
after a short vowel (where diphthongs are regarded as long vowels).

»Nach einem kurzen Vokal (Selbstlaut) wird aus ß ein ss (Doppel-s).
„Gruß und Kuss von Julius“ – Um Sie nicht länger auf die Folter zu spannen: Der
Kuss wird neu mit ss (Doppel-s) geschrieben, während der Gruß sein ß (scharfes
s oder Eszett) behalten darf.«

Your example of wasser is even relevant to Duden’s guide here:

https://www.duden.de/sprachwissen/sprachratgeber/Crashkurs-25-Schritten-zur-neuen-Rechtschreibung#001

The related adjective was »wäßrig« in the old spelling, and is »wässrig« in the
new. Admirable consistency.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>The new system for s/ß is simpler, more consistent and easier to
>>learn.
>Many natives claim that the long/short distinction IN THIS CASE is a matter
>of spelling pronunciation, which may be welcome to nonnatives but not for
>natives.

Already the expression "the new system for s/ß" is misleading,
because it's for "s/ss/ß". There are /three/ possible spellings
for the /s/ at the end of a syllable one has to choose from.

There is no rule for deciding whether to use "s" ("Aas" with a
long /a/, "Bus" with a short /u/) or "ss/ß" ("Fraß" with a long
/a/, "dass" with a short /a/) - this has to be memorized for each
word. Only, if one has already memorized that a word is ending in
one of "ss/ß", then the length of the vowel can be used to resolve
the spelling, but since people do not want to think constantly when
writing, I guess most have also just memorized this for each word.

(A foreign language learner learning German also has to
memorize for every word whether an S sound at the end is
spelled "s" or "ss/ß". For native language pupils, Marx has
shown that they make more errors with the news system, while
they did nearly not make any errors at all in this regard
[an /s/ sound at the end of a syllable] with the old system.)

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote or quoted:
>And you don’t mention the upside of the reform, which was
>more internal consistency regarding whether a double or a
>single consonant should be written after a short vowel (where
>diphthongs are regarded as long vowels).

Yes, its appears to be an upside until you take note of the fact
that native pupils did nearly not make any errors with the old
system but make many errors with the new, as Marx has observed.

This is the difference between thinking in a model and measuring:

People found out that in vitro vitamin E is an antioxidant,
so they recommended it as a supplement. It's "logical"
that it should be helpful. What happened next? Quote:

|Cancer: The Popular Vitamin Linked To 91% Higher Risk Of Disease

. This is the difference between thinking in a model and
measuring what happens. Now most people have stopped taking
high doses of vitamin E.

They still require that you use the new spelling rules in
schools, though; they are just so "logical" it can't be that
there are more errors now!

Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
> Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>> Ruud Harmsen <rh@rudhar.com> wrote:
>>> The new system for s/ß is simpler, more consistent and easier to
>>> learn.
>> Many natives claim that the long/short distinction IN THIS CASE is a matter
>> of spelling pronunciation, which may be welcome to nonnatives but not for
>> natives.
>
> Already the expression "the new system for s/ß" is misleading,
> because it's for "s/ss/ß". There are /three/ possible spellings
> for the /s/ at the end of a syllable one has to choose from.
>
> There is no rule for deciding whether to use "s" ("Aas" with a
> long /a/, "Bus" with a short /u/) or "ss/ß" ("Fraß" with a long
> /a/, "dass" with a short /a/) - this has to be memorized for each
> word. Only, if one has already memorized that a word is ending in
> one of "ss/ß", then the length of the vowel can be used to resolve
> the spelling, but since people do not want to think constantly when
> writing, I guess most have also just memorized this for each word.
>
> (A foreign language learner learning German also has to
> memorize for every word whether an S sound at the end is
> spelled "s" or "ss/ß".

A foreigner only has to know the spelling and pronounce accordingly, unless
they're learning purely by immersion.

As a learner, you're limited to what you're taught, and if you're only
taught a standard then it's just up to you to learn it perfectly.
That's a major 'advantage' foreigners always have over natives and that's
why so many people say absurd things like that many foreigners 'speak
better' than natives.

And that's why you know your english is improving when you start mixing up
then with than.

>For native language pupils, Marx has
> shown that they make more errors with the news system, while
> they did nearly not make any errors at all in this regard
> [an /s/ sound at the end of a syllable] with the old system.)
>

Antonio Marques <no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote or quoted:
>Stefan Ram <ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de> wrote:
>>(A foreign language learner learning German also has to
>>memorize for every word whether an S sound at the end is
>>spelled "s" or "ss/ß".
>A foreigner only has to know the spelling and pronounce accordingly,

Yes, but when he knows the spelling he knows /a fortiori/ whether
it ends in "s", "ss", or "ß".

On Tue, 5 Mar 2024, Stefan Ram wrote:

> ram@zedat.fu-berlin.de (Stefan Ram) wrote or quoted:
> >The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/
>
> The word written "Meßſtelle" 100 years ago, in the schools
> today is spelled "Messstelle" with three "s". The "ß" clearly
> marked the end of a syllable, and "ſ" the beginning of a new
> syllable, even though both share the same pronunciation.
>
> A "Messer" is a knife, and "Meß-" means "related to a measurement".
> A "Meßergebnis" is a "measurement result".

A this is why *you* write „Meßung“ because it is related to measurement.
The correct spelling (before and after the rule change), however, is
„Messung“, which in Stefan’s opinion relates it to knife with -ss-, not to
Meß- with -ß-.

No, that's simply wrong. In any position other than the end of a syllable,
the ss/ß distinction depends solely on the length of the vowel before the
ss/ß, not on meaning or on syllables. E.g. „Masse“ and „Maße“ (spelled so
before and after the change) have different lengths of the -a- but are
otherwise the same.

The extra rule that -ß- is written instead of -ss- if at the end of a
syllable was dropped. Nothing else changed.

--
Helmut Richter