Letter from Berlin: Mark Twain once remarked that some German words are so long that they have a perspective. Words like Unabhängigkeitserklärung (declaration of independence) are, he observed, not so much words as processions, writes Derek Scally
"One can open a German newspaper at any time and see them marching majestically across the page - and if he has any imagination he can see the banners and hear the music, too." Six years ago, Germany finally paid heed to Mr Twain's hilarious essay, The Awful German Language, with the introduction of the Rechtschreibreform (spelling reform) with the aim of simplifying the rules governing German spelling.
Breathtaking compound words such as Fussballweltmeisterschaftsqualifikationsspiel (World Cup qualification match) could now be broken up, capital letters could be used less and the ß (Esszet) character particular to German could be replaced in many cases with "ss". The 52 rules governing the use of the comma were thinned out to just nine and the rules governing the "Germanising" of foreign words were made more systematic.
The new spelling rules are already obligatory in all public offices and schools, while the rest of the country had a seven-year transition period, which runs out in a year's time. By the end of the transition period, the total bill for the reform, mostly spent on reprinting government documents and schoolbooks, is expected to top €250 million.
But, a year before the new rules become standard, leading politicians, teachers and artists have pronounced the language experiment a failure and are demanding a return to the old spelling rules.
The Rechtschreibreform was a brave attempt to tame the German language, a wild beast that has defied all previous attempts to bring it under control. The language developed regionally over the centuries with two sets of guidelines to govern its spelling: clear rules that could be applied in any case, and "individual stipulations" which, while not completely random, could hardly be described as systematic.
A unified spelling system was introduced in 1902 but subsequent annual attempts to reform the language were completely ignored. After discussing spelling reform for most of the 20th century, a final big-bang agreement was signed in Vienna in 1996 by Germany, Austria, Switzerland and Liechtenstein.
In Germany, the spelling reform came into effect in August 1998, and newspapers and magazines were among the first to move over to the new spelling system. But things started to go wrong when Germany's most serious newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, threw up its hands in despair and returned to the old rules in August 2000.
The debate reared its head again last month when language guardians announced a minor reform of the spelling reform. For some, it was the final straw.
Leading German author Martin Walser announced that, in future, he was going to write as he pleased and ignore the spelling reform, which he said was "borne of bureaucratic idleness".
Opposition politicians, always fans of a ride on a populist bandwagon, have called for the old rules to be reintroduced.
"It cannot be that, as a result, everyone writes as they want and that there is no accepted order any more," said Mr Edmund Stoiber, the conservative state premier of Bavaria. "Clarity in the German language is the core of our cultural identity. The spelling reform has brought in considerable insecurity."
German language teachers, at the front lines of this language experiment, appear to fall into three groups: those who want the old rules back, those who want to keep the new rules, and the largest group who just want clarity and don't care whether it's with the old or the new rules.
"It's difficult to say what we want," said Mr Josef Kraus, president of the German Teachers' Associations, told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper.
Teachers say many students show little interest in following rules their parents and grandparents ignore, and that the reform has introduced an "as you like it" approach to spelling.
Many of the new rules make sense but it's hard to disagree that, in other ways, the new rules are more for professional linguists than ordinary Germans.
The deputy head of the spelling reform commission, Prof Gerhard Augst, was asked on national radio yesterday how Germans should spell the word yogurt from next year: will it be "joghurt" or "jogurt"? Prof Augst told listeners how the word has a "Greek gh" and comes from the Hungarian, but gave no answer about how to spell the word.
I had a rude awakening last week when I realised that the word for street is still spelled as I learned it - Straße - and has not, because of the reform, become Strasse, as I and many others seem to think.
It's all about long vowels and short vowels, you see. In Switzerland, it's Strasse and not Straße, but that's another story.