Re: Official German spelling update

On 2024-07-13, Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote:
 

The Council for German Orthography has released the report about
its activities during the period 2017-2023 as well as a revised
official ruleset combined with a new edition of its word list.

 
Thanks for the series of posts, I hadn’t noticed the change. Nothing drastic to
it, as far as I can see.

 
I just finished going through the report.  Among other things, it
details the changes and provides rationales.  Overall those are
just minor tweaks for some corner cases.  There are also some purely
editorial changes; the Council is proud to have condensed the
description of the comma rules and to have improved the overall
integration of ruleset and word list.
 
The report also contains some hints how the sausage is made.  You
would think that orthography is a purely prescriptive endeavor, but
it turns out there is a large descriptive component.  They monitor
the usage of professional writers (newspapers mostly) and are trying
to accommodate what people actually use if it can be formalized in
rules and doesn't interfere with other aspects of the orthography.
Also, assimilated spellings that fail to catch on (e.g. "Spagetti")
are dropped again.
 
The Austrians are running a project where they analyze secondary
school exit exams (Matura) for adherence to the standard orthography.
Two thirds of the mistakes are comma-related, one third are spelling
mistakes.  More than half of the latter relate to the capitalization
rules, the next largest group is closed versus open compounds.  Water
is wet.