Talk:German alphabet

message: I'm almost absolutely positive that the umlauts aren't alphabetised separately.
-- Toby Bartels 04:10 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
: You are right. I think this page is dispensable altogether; there is no "German alphabet"; we use the same 26 Latin letters as everyone else. Umlauts are no separate letters and aren't sorted separately; most people make no difference between "Ä" and "A" when sorting. Phonebooks are a bit more picky and sort "Ä" as if it still was the ligature from which it derived, "Ae". djmutex 06:54 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
:: Really? I was teached at elementary school that the alphabet consists of 29 letters plus ß, and that the non-latin letters are sorted like their non-umlaut ersatz forms (ae, oe, ue, ss). That was in the early 1980s, things may have changed since however. --LordToran (talk) 00:52, 16 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Thank you, except that I think you misunderstood what I was trying to say. :-) djmutex 08:59 12 Jun 2003 (UTC)
German most certainly counts ä, ö, ü, and ß as separate letters. Compare the German page on the same topic, which is correct in this respect: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsches_Alphabet
This page therefore needs to be corrected.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 92.28.127.169 (talk) 12:07, 15 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: First comment

message: In the second phrase: "German uses letter-diacritic combinations (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) using the umlaut", but Umlaut is a diacritic (the phonetic phenomenon). To be honest, all articles related with this term leads the reader to the same confusion. So, the phrase could be better if it was: "German uses letter-diacritic combinations (Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) knows as umlaut using the trema mark" 195.93.244.97 (talk) 09:48, 6 March 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: A trema consists of double dots. That does not mean that double dots always form a trema. The double dots in "Köln" may look like a trema, but they are not. Richard 08:43, 7 March 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusion first paragraph 

message: I do not understand the sentence Geographical names in particular are often required to be written with A, O, U plus e, 
in particular the word "required". 
Does this mean "there are circumstances in which no geographical names with Umlauts are allowed"? I don't think so.
Or does it mean "there are geographical names with ae/oe/ue which are never written with umlauts"?  That is certainly true (the Duden mentiones Oelsnitz and Oebisfelde), but this is true for many names, not only geographical ones.  Goethe is never spelled with ö. 
-- Austrian 22:19, 13 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Geographical names 

message: I'm afraid this page is trying to replicate much of the information that is already found under ß and Umlaut, and these articles are as comprehensive as this one can ever hope to be. I would like to suggest that we cut down the descriptions of the extra letters a little and concentrate on a comprehensive account of collation rules, pointing, of course, the inclined reader to the mentioned articles.
By the way, I removed the section about Fraktur. Fraktur is not an alphabet. It's a typeface which can be used to print the 30 letters described in this article just like an Antiqua typeface can. --SKopp 01:48, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I'm reluctant to just unilaterally revert it, but I don't think the stuff on Fraktur should've been removed. Fraktur's not an alphabet, true (at least, for given values of alphabet), but Fraktur was quite significant to the German orthography. The italicised word's why I'm reluctant to just add it back, but I think something about Fraktur should be mentioned that's mostly just a link to a page on Fraktur. I don't think you could get less than what was there before (modifying the word 'alphabet' as appropriate). (People also often use words like 'German alphabet' to express a meaning ambiguous between blackletter and Fraktur styles, so in any case something about Fraktur needs to be here.) Felix the Cassowary 08:34, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Some general thoughts 

message: I think this article is missing some information about the "common" letters. It (barely) explains the use of y, x, c, ß, etc., but doesn't explain how the other letters are used (e.g.: Are "f" and "v" two letters for the same sound? The first vowel of the name of the letter "y" corresponds to one of ä, ö, ü or is it a different vowel? Is it pronounced as its name implies?). The name of the letters may give some clue, but they are not enough. Some information from "German Phonology" may help to enrich this article.
: y is pronounced ['ypsilo:n], the first vowel is the same as an ü. In German words, y can be pronounced like ü (Xylofon, Physik), like i (Baby, Handy) or like j (Yacht) --Androl 13:35, 1 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: f is always pronounced [f], v is either pronounced [f] or [v]. x is [ks], ß is [s], and c is one of a myriad of variants depending on the word's origin, what di- or trigraph it's part of, and so on. —Nightstallion (?) 14:58, 3 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Does anybody object if I add a pronunciation table near the end of the article? After all, German phonology does only list the sounds, but not how written German is to be pronounced. --Wutzofant (✉✍) 12:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

text: In the beginning of a word "v" is pronounced as [f] in all words and names that are originally German (or Dutch). Otherwise, so in loanwords from other languages and in the midst of a word "v" is pronounced as [v] (exceptions: evangelisch, Hannover)   —Preceding unsigned comment added by 89.52.180.182 (talk) 18:32, 16 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Information I would like to see 

message: How did the stereotype arise that German speakers, when speaking English, mispronounce the V like a W? I understand the W=V part, but how does V=W when clearly V=F? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.188.172.165 (talk • contribs) 11:14, 5 October 2006 GMT+11.
: It’s the sounds, not the writing system, that count here. The German sound of w is not always [v]; frequently, it’s a sound mid-way between [v] and [w] (a labiodental approximant). This particular phone can sound like either /v/ or /w/ to English speakers, and often sounds like the other one. —Felix the Cassowary 06:20, 14 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: W equals V, V equals W

message: Nothing is written about the letter combination, used in German, i.e.:
ie, ei, sch, tsch, etc.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Asker123 (talk • contribs) 10:06, 7 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Comes the question: do these combinations have a place in the alphabet?. I know that for example in Hungarian the "combinations" cs, dz, dzs, gy, ly, ny, sz, ty and zs have their own place in the alphabet but that isn't the case in German: ie are two letters: i and e. So, in my opinion, the combinations might be worth mentioning somewhere but not in this article. Richard 09:35, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Letter combinations 

message: Quote: "loan words from the French language spelling and diacritics are usually preserved"
This is not true. Indeed, the accents are usually not preserved, except for -é- in the end of a word: Café, Kommuniqué, etc. It is only in exceptions that an accent grave or circonflexe can occur.
:No, you are wrong here. Especially french accents are normally always preserved – all of them that are somehow accessible. So you often see the french "à" in Germany in the meaning of "zu" (e.g. "6 Gläser à 250 ml") or in the combination "à la ..." and a "Crème fraîche" is also always written like this. So it is clearly not only the "é". --188.104.139.25 (talk) 23:56, 29 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Error 

message: I’ve changed the introduction here; it started by saying the alphabet had 26 letters, then further down it has a section for four extra letters. That makes it a 30 letter alphabet by my reckoning. And the link to Latin-based alphabet describes German as an Extended Latin Alphabet, so I’ve added put that here too. I  also thought the Latin letters should have their own section, too. Moonraker12 (talk) 17:38, 28 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: That is a difficult case: The four extra-letters are somewhere in between. On the one hand, German children learn in elementary school that the alphabet consists of 26 letters, and when enumerating the letters of the alphabet, Germans usually will not mention the umlauts or ß. On the other hand, the extra four letters are "felt" to be sufficiently distinct so as to not be exchanged for their base variants, e.g. even lazy German writers will rather not write A instead of Ä, like it is done in Spanish or French when leaving away the accent marks. 129.69.215.20 (talk) 09:32, 5 September 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Introduction 

message: When listening to the extra letters, I noticed that the sounds were the same as in Tux Paint.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 70.190.123.204 (talk) 17:24, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extra letters 

message: The turrets on the battleship Bismarck were named: Anton, Bruno, Caesar, Dora. The article makes no mention of the word Bruno being used as part of the WWII German spelling alphabet. Was this just an anomaly, or are there other instances of this? -Noha307 (talk) 02:47, 8 October 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bruno 

message: It is not true that most Germans think that there are 26 letters. If you compare this article to the German version of this article, you can see the section with the comment, that some say it’s 26, some say it’s 27 (including the ß) and some saying it’s 30 (including äöüß). 92.10.254.18 (talk) 10:26, 5 January 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Number of letters 

message: I think this page might need to be merged with German orthography. The only piece of information on this page that isn’t covered at German orthography is the spelling alphabet, which could easily be added as a column to the current tables in the alphabet section of the German orthography pages. 2001:BB6:B84C:CF00:15BB:56B7:7154:568D (talk) 12:35, 12 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Merger with a German Orthography 

message: The traditional german spelling alphabet "postalische Buchstabiertafel" got replaced by "Deutsche Buchstabiertafel für Wirtschaft und Verwaltung" as can bee seen here. I did read the DIN 5009 which states that table reworked in 2020 was only symbolic to revert the changed the nazis made. In the official table, the spelling alphabet consits of german cities. 2A00:8A60:C010:1:0:0:1:10F2 (talk) 15:45, 13 February 2024 (UTC)
thread_title:  Spelling alphabet is incorrect