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