riddle@im4u.UUCP (08/25/85)
I thought I'd mention an anecdote regarding the controversy over German
orthography: It seems that a German judge recently threw a criminal case out
of court because the defendant's name wasn't properly spelled on the court
papers. The defendant was named (let's say) 'M"uller,' and the prosecutor
had prepared the charges on an umlaut-less word processor and used the
alternate spelling 'Mueller.' Needless to say, the defendant was pleased
and the prosecutor was pissed.
It's perfectly true that German can be spelled with very little ambiguity by
substituting digraphs for its unusual characters, and this is already
commonly done in many computer applications. That doesn't mean that Germans
are pleased with the situation, as the above story illustrates.
There is one reform that appears to be in better favor, however: the
'ess-zett,' the character that resembles a beta and represents the hard 's'
sound, appears to be dying slowly out to be replaced with the digraph 'ss'.
One of my old German professors even told his class that his new German-made
typewriter completely lacked an ess-zett.
--- Prentiss Riddle ("Aprendiz de todo, maestro de nada.")
--- {ihnp4,harvard,seismo,gatech}!ut-sally!riddle riddle@ut-sally.UUCP
--- riddle@ut-sally.ARPA, riddle%zotz@ut-sally, riddle%im4u@ut-sally