GERMANY: Germany's difficult spell just got more difficult yesterday after the publishers of Der Spiegel magazine and top-selling newspaper Bild announced they were abandoning unpopular new spelling rules.
It's just the latest twist in Germany's Rechtschreibreform (spelling reform) which was introduced with the best of intentions in 1998 but has transformed the German language, once a model of precision and order, into a spelling free-for-all.
"On a day-to-day basis, the reform has failed," said Stefan Aust, editor of Der Spiegel, and Mathias Döpfner, head of Axel Springer Verlag, publisher of Bild, Die Welt and other newspapers. "We are in favour of the urgently needed reforms in our society, but this is no reform.
"This is a step backwards. The situation is getting worse, confusion is growing greater."
The Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper was the first to abandon the rules in 2000. Yesterday, the Süddeutsche Zeitung announced it too would join the migration back to the old rules.
The discourse dispute means that of Germany's national news publications, only one newspaper, the Tageszeitung, and two news magazines, Stern and Focus, will use the new rules.
Der Spiegel's website even showed how to switch off the new rule spell check in Microsoft "Word". "I cannot imagine that the spelling reform can still stand now," said a spokesman for the German Journalists' Association.
The move was welcomed by German publishers, even though they enjoyed a boom republishing Goethe and Schiller with the new spelling rules.
"An unreasonable clique whipped this senseless reform through dictatorially, for no clear reason, against historical and linguistic sense and against the huge majority of the population," said Mr Wolfgang Balk, publisher of German Paperback Publishers. "Better an end to this horror than an endless horror."
Political backers of the new spelling rules criticised yesterday's move, pointing out that 12 million schoolchildren had been taught them since 1998. "I cannot understand this step," said Ms Doris Ahnen, president of Germany's Cultural Ministers Conference.
A special language commission agreed the new rules, implemented in 1998, with the aim of simplifying the use of the comma, spelling, capitalisation and compound nouns.
The "ß" letter was also replaced in many, but not all, cases with "ss". The new 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.
By the end of the transition period, the bill for the reform, mostly spent on reprinting government documents and schoolbooks, will top €250 million. Returning to the old rules, or reaching a compromise, would double that bill.
Schoolchildren have spent years grappling with seemingly contradictory new spelling guidelines; older people have refused to change their spelling ways; and teenagers use either new rules or old rules at will, to the despair of teachers and parents.