Re: Jonathan Swift published a proposal to regulate English (22-2-1712)

Aidan Kehoe <kehoea@parhasard.net> wrote or quoted:

I’m surprised at the increase in mistakes, I found the
post-1996 spelling agreeably consistent when I learned German
from 2002 onwards, but I have no big stake in this.

  In normal German, syllables that end with the sound /s/ can
  be written with "s" or "ß" at the end. An example would be
  the words "das" and "daß".

  (A sequence "ss" in words such as "Wasser" is analyzed as
  "Was|ser", with one "s" ending the first syllabe and the
  next "s" starting the second syllable.)

  The spellings imposed on people in schools today have /three/
  possible endings for syllables ending with the sound /s/:
  "ss", "s" and "ß"; for example, "dass", "Bus", and "buß".
  Things have become more complicated, and writers have to
  think more about spellings. Indeed, Marx has found that
  pupils today make more mistakes regarding such words.