Re: Announcement: New auxlang "Choton"

On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 11:02:53 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> (Unless you're telling us you've got a geminate in _Messer_ ...)
I don't think that German has any geminates (except possibly in
NRW...); doubled consonants typically only indicate vowel length.
(Hence the spelling reform changing some single consonants to double
ones in loanwords such as "Tipp".)

Incidentally, I wonder whether it might make sense to re-spell "ck" as
"kk"; this would be consistent with the other
stops-indicating-short-vowel "pp" and "tt" and would eliminate the
annoying problem of how to hyphenate it. (New rule is "place hyphen
before -ck, e.g. ba-cken"; old rule is "change 'ck' to 'k-k' and
hyphenate between the two consonants, e.g. bak-ken" which makes
marginally more sense (since you hyphenate between two orthographic
consonants just as with p-p and t-t) but is more difficult to
implement in software.


On Sun, 10 Oct 2004 12:50:25 +0200, Andreas Johansson <andjo@...> wrote:
> I like some bits of the reforms and dislike others - the new rules for the eszet
> is among what I like; I find them easier and more useful. Things I dislike
> include the triple consonants (_Schifffarhrt_) and some of the new rules for
> Zusammen-/Getrenntschreibung.
*nods* Zusammen-/Getrenntschreibung is also one my father's pet peeves
- a favourite example of his is "ein Schwerbehinderter" which, he
says, should now be spelled "ein schwer Behinderter", which has an
adverb modifying a noun, which is nonsense, he says. (And "ein
schwerer Behinderter" has a completely different meaning: someone who
is heavy and handicapped rather than severely handicapped.)

It's also one of the points I haven't internalised - another is
capitalisation. Perhaps they should just do it like English and
capitalise only proper nouns....

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>
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