Re: French and German (jara: An introduction)

Quoting Sally Caves <scaves@...>:

> ----- Original Message -----
>
> Somebody Jan was responding to:
> > > For some reason, I've lately heard alot of flak against German's
> supposed
> > > orthographical horrors. I don't really see why - it may be less
> regular
> than
> > > French, but the system is certainly alot less exotic to someone used
> to
> > > Swedish orthography (which in turn is more erratic than German), and
> at
> any
> > > rate it's way simpler than English.
>
> Are you sure these people are not referring to the old German
> orthography,
> i.e., the printing customs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
> that
> were reformed?
Well, I don't know, but some of the flakkers have been people I would be very
surprised if they'd read anything that old, in any language.

>  Look at any old book in German circa 1870.  The
> flourishes.
> The conjoined letters, especially the double ss.  There is a term for
> this
> kind of German printing that I can't recall at the moment, but it's
> fiendish
> to the outsider.
I think you're refering to "Fraktur". Well, it does take some getting used to
... but the actual _spelling_ is little worse than today's (in some ways better,
becuase you don't get funky loans like _Pager_ ['pe:dZ6] with any frequency).

> I find nothing particularly difficult about German
> orthography today, and I can't understand how you would say that its
> writing
> system is less regular than French!
My knowledge of French spelling is, well, not complete, but I'm told that once
you know all the etabmannic rules, you can predict the pronunciation of almost
every word, whereas German has a not negible fraction of words with ambiguous
spellings.

>  It seems pretty phonetic, whereas
> in
> French you have to remember which endings are silent and which not.
Nothing much is silent, except the silent things*, but it's not even close to
one letter <-> one phoneme phonemicity.

* Primarily the postvocalic H's. Some of them.

                                                Andreas

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