"I would rather decline two drinks than one German verb" Mark Twain

[thineownself]

Oh please. Oh please.
Any higher orthography-loving power out there, hear me beg - make them take back that idiotic reform

Comments

[thineownself]

There is hope.

By the way, I still haven't come up with a decent Berlin entry... and you are almost here! Argh!

I can recommend Wladimir Kaminer's books though...
"Schönhauser Allee" is cool, and that's even in Prenzlauer Berg - I think you mentioned you are going to live there?
(Also cool as an audiobook read by himself.)

[davidfrazer]

I just read an essay supporting the spelling reform:Spiegel, and I imagine the rest of the refusenik press, is indulging in the single most common reason why spelling reforms are rejected: Old people don’t like them. Folks who learned the old way will whine and whine about how they changed the language and about how if the old way was good enough for them, it’s good enough for the next generation. It is precisely this sort of thinking that makes Chinese, Japanese, French and English such a mess.

Frankly. I think the odd spelling reform is good for any society that ties as much prestige to correct spelling as Die Spiegel seems to think Germans do. It disempowers the old and established and empowers the young and unestablished, even if only a little and only briefly. I wish the French would do it. I still have hope for them. It’ll never happen in the English speaking world, at least not in my lifetime.