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Article: Angst over Anglicizing. (reforming the German language)
- Article from:
- Europe
- Article date:
- October 1, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 Delegation of the European Commission. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Mark Twain in his essay "A Tramp Abroad" complained bitterly about "the awful German language" and wrote that "a person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a perplexing language it is."
Indeed, the language of Luther and Goethe is fiddled with so many rules governing grammar and spelling that even native speakers are often confused when placing commas or hyphenating words or deciding how many of the same consonants can be lined up next to each other in a compound noun. An attempt, therefore, to simplify the German language seemed an admirable exercise.
More than ten years of deliberation by linguists, lexicographers, pedagogues, and ...