Making German More <I>Spass</I>

Arbeitslosenunter- stutzungsamtsgebäude. Dampfschifffahrtsgesellschafts- kapitaen. Landmaschinen- baugesellschaftsunternehmer.

With such Teutonic tongue twisters, German can be a daunting language, even for native speakers.

Infamous for its confounding grammatical cases, endless punctuation rules and teetering compound nouns, die Deutsche Sprache even drove Mark Twain to write a scathing essay called "The Awful German Language."

It's no surprise, then, that some philological do-gooders would try to take some of the pain out of learning German.

After a long campaign by certain linguists, teachers and politicians, parliament in the mid-1990s passed the Rechtsschreibereform, or "correct writing reforms."

Under the reforms, the number of spelling regulations would be reduced from 212 to 112.

Rules pertaining to comma placement would be abridged from over 50 to just nine. And the "hard 'S'", or Eszett, represented by "ß";, would be altogether done away with and replaced by a double "S".

That would allow, for example, the German word for fun, Spaß, to instead be written as Spass.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

Now, just one year before the reforms were to go into effect nationwide, Germany is in the throes of what one newspaper has called a "Spelling Revolt."

A small, but vocal, group has come out against the language reforms, led by the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper and supported on the opposite end of the political spectrum by the left-leaning writer Günter Grass.
The critics of the reforms admit that German is, indeed, a difficult language: It's exacting, complicated, even convoluted.

But it's ours, they say: Generations have learned it the traditional way. For German students, fretting over where to place that comma is a rite of passage.

Besides, opponents wonder, what business do government bureaucrats have messing with something as organic as language?

The Frankfurter Allgemeine, which completely abandoned the new rules on August 1, has run a series of impassioned editorials defending its action and supporting the old-fashioned German language, which it calls "the basis and binding element of culture and civilization."

On the other side, a prominent national parents' group has come out in support of the reforms, claiming that children have taken to the new rules.

Several government officials, including the federal education minister, have also endorsed the Rechtsschreibereform, and so far other newspapers are sticking with it.

By CHRISTOPHER WEBER