On 01.12.2024 22:01, Daniel Buncic via Unicode wrote:
Am 01.12.2024 um 21:29 schrieb Alexander Lange via Unicode:
In German orthography, double consonants mark the preceding vowel as
being short (if there isn’t just a mere co-incidence in a compound,
e. g. “Mausschwanz” (mouse tail)). As the “a” in “Straße” is long,
you write “ß”; as the “a” in “Gasse” is short, you write “ss”.
This is the new rule since the 1996 reform though.
No, this has always been the rule. However, the rule used to have one
exception, namely that at the end of a word and before a consonant you
could only have ß, even if the vowel was short. It is only this
exception (which was based on long ſ in blackletter and therefore
quite obsolete) that was abolished in the 1998 spelling reform.
The rule set till 1996 was called Adelungsche s-Schreibung:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelungsche_s-Schreibung
And the one now in effect is called Heysesche s-Schreibung:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heysesche_s-Schreibung
What you call an exception is the difference between the two. And both
are from the time when long ſ was still used, so this doesn't make one
more obsolete than the other.
But I would not want to argue about this. Whether the second criterion
in Adelung's rule is part of the rule or an exception doesn't really
matter, it would just be nitpicking. The thing I found weird is that our
schoolbooks and teachers listed a lot of words as irregular exceptions
that we would have to memorize, when in fact they all could have been
explained with just one or two more sentences (like we both just did).
Kind regards,
Alexander
