From: naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   On 2024-07-13, Aidan Kehoe  wrote:   
      
   > > > The Council for German Orthography has released the report about   
   > > > its activities during the period 2017-2023 as well as a revised   
   > > > official ruleset combined with a new edition of its word list.   
   >   
   > Thanks for the series of posts, I hadn’t noticed the change. Nothing   
   drastic to   
   > it, as far as I can see.   
      
   I just finished going through the report.  Among other things, it   
   details the changes and provides rationales.  Overall those are   
   just minor tweaks for some corner cases.  There are also some purely   
   editorial changes; the Council is proud to have condensed the   
   description of the comma rules and to have improved the overall   
   integration of ruleset and word list.   
      
   The report also contains some hints how the sausage is made.  You   
   would think that orthography is a purely prescriptive endeavor, but   
   it turns out there is a large descriptive component.  They monitor   
   the usage of professional writers (newspapers mostly) and are trying   
   to accommodate what people actually use if it can be formalized in   
   rules and doesn't interfere with other aspects of the orthography.   
   Also, assimilated spellings that fail to catch on (e.g. "Spagetti")   
   are dropped again.   
      
   The Austrians are running a project where they analyze secondary   
   school exit exams (Matura) for adherence to the standard orthography.   
   Two thirds of the mistakes are comma-related, one third are spelling   
   mistakes.  More than half of the latter relate to the capitalization   
   rules, the next largest group is closed versus open compounds.  Water   
   is wet.   
      
   --   
   Christian "naddy" Weisgerber                          naddy@mips.inka.de   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)