Talk:German orthography

message: This article is not about German orthography at all. (See Orthography.) It discusses phonology as related to or discernable from the spelling of a word. It might therefore make a good addition to the German phonology page.
:I was about to write that. You beat me to it.
::This is about orthography and letter-to-sound correspondence, which has absolutely nothing to do with phonology. I suggest that you read up on what the term actually means. I've removed the sign here and at German phonology.
::Peter Isotalo 20:45, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I actually agree with the anon comments. So far this article only discusses phonological notation of Standard German. An actual article on German orthography would include material along the lines of :de:Deutsche Rechtschreibung, Standard_German#Orthography. I suggest we either expand it, or merge it into phonology for now, making this title a redirect to Standard German. dab (ᛏ) 10:34, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I think this page should be kept. I typed in "German Orthography" hoping for something like this and got it. 66.81.36.255 20:27, 20 February 2006 (UTC)

text: I've tried to make such an expansion of the article, and have therefore removed that merging request. ― j. 'mach' wust | ✑ 10:47, 13 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Orthography 

message: I don't think that this page should merge with German phonology but I did notice that the German alphabet page seems to cover the same area as this page.  One should merge into the other.  This one is much more developed AEuSoes1 08:50, 11 June 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: merger

message: I came to this article in the hope of finding out about rules of capitalization of German. Nothing here. As pointed out above, this article has some good stuff, but it's hardly orthography. -- Hoary 10:51, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Your rule doesn't account for capitalization in etwas Schönes, alles Gute, gestern Abend. —Angr If you've written a quality article... 14:54, 16 February 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Hm? I fail to see the problem: das Schöne, das Gute, der Abend. Or am I missing something? --Florian Blaschke (talk) 02:52, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Hm... I'm German and once said here on WP that German interpunctation is easy... but capitalization is, let's face it, not. That is, capitalization is easy if your goal is to get around and do most things in the correct way. Capitalize nouns and adjectives that really take the place of nouns; in case of a doubt do not capitalize. But if you want to understand things altogether... and perhaps if you even want to avoid the semi-logical but ugly forms the 1996 reform provided us with... then that's more difficult.--93.135.54.184 (talk) 11:24, 22 January 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Still, there are tougher cases, eg »Ich komme um neun« (»I’ll come at nine»). »Heute Abend« (tonight) vs »abends« (in the evening). – Another difference to English is the straightforward plainly normal capitalization in English headlines, whereas English (why not »english« – or do I misspell?) headlines are a nightmare for Germans to set. — Fritz Jörn (talk) 09:01, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: In English, adjectives based on geographical entities, should be capitalized. Richard 08:29, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: And a basical rule of German would be that you don't do that. :-) --2001:A61:21AD:FA01:95A0:C7D2:6319:E458 (talk) 11:17, 4 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Capitalization

message: A lot of places in eastern Germany are spelled with "ow" for [oː], e.g. Güstrow, Pankow, Lüchow.  Does this have the status of an orthographic rule, to be added to the article? Lfh (talk) 18:29, 2 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd say this is a case of a special regional orthographic feature that departs from the normal standard. Other samples include the occasional Northwestern pronunciation of 〈ae〉, 〈oe〉, 〈ue〉 as /aː/, /oː/, /uː/ (instead of standard /ɛː/, /øː/, /yː/ – for instance in Soest, Kues or Raesfeld), or the Swiss (Southern?) pronunciation of 〈gg〉 as free vowel fortis /k/ (instead of standard checked vowel lenis /ɡ/ – for instance in Elgg or in Ringgenberg). I guess if cases like these are mentioned at all, then a special section about regional non-standard spellings should be created. -- machᵗᵃˡᵏ 10:17, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There seem to be some orthographical subregularities found only in proper names, especially place names. Another example is the "Dehnungs-C" encountered in North German place names like Lübeck and Mecklenburg, which were originally pronounced with /e:/, although nowadays /ɛ/ is probably more common. Other letters that can be used to indicate long vowels in names include "i" (in Voigt /fo:kt/, a surname rather than a placename) and "y" (in Bad Oeynhausen /ø:nhauzən/). +Angr 10:44, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I did have a half-suspicion that Mecklenburg was with .  That explains why - thanks!  Perhaps the pron should be added to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.  But if these "rules" only apply to proper names then let's not put them in the main table in this article, as you say.  Lfh (talk) 14:31, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: There are a lot of interesting examples at :de:Dehnungszeichen. +Angr 15:41, 4 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: The c in Mecklenburg, Lübeck (?) and the like is not actually a "Dehnungs-c"; they did not put it there to indicate that the vowel is long. They put it there for the exact same reason why they put it into Bismarck ("past l, n, r be sure, I say: there's no tz, there's no ck"); because they liked not to be stingy with letters: only the e's in question are long nevertheless, and because for some reason they did not go the whole hog and write "Meecklenburg", we confuse that now with our brevity-marker and read the vowels as short. (Which is why when a typical Hanseatic family name would be Buddenbrock, spoken as if it were *Buddenbrook, Thomas Mann actually took the unusual latter one for his saga to make sure these ignorant non-Northerners would not constantly mispronounce it.)--2001:A61:20C0:A601:C803:C1FE:37CB:14D9 (talk) 10:11, 30 June 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  "ow" for [oː] 

message: Since orthography includes punctuation, that should be covered by the article as well. -- Beland (talk) 14:27, 11 October 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Main difference: no comma before and in a sequence, eg »Äpfel, Birnen und andere Früchte« (vs apples, pears, and other fruit).  No second space at start of new sentence, but this (oldfashioned?) rule seems to vanish in English as well. – Fritz Jörn (talk) 09:08, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: That extra comma is not used by everyone. See comma#in lists and serial comma. Richard 08:33, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Added information about punctuation. Burzuchius (talk) 19:26, 24 August 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Punctuation 

message: The plosives in German(p,t,k) are aspirated when they are followed by a vowel but there's no mark on that.
Michster (talk) 23:09, 5 February 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: This is an article on orthography, not phonology. German phonology is the place to discuss that sort of thing. Angr (talk) 10:45, 6 February 2012 (UTC)

text: Good point. The section should really be edited to indicate phonemes rather than surface phones. Angr (talk) 21:58, 7 February 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Pronunciation 

message: Somewhere you might like to help people with English keyboards. In Windows you get
ü with Alt129 
Ü with Alt154 
ö with Alt148  
Ö with Alt153
ä with Alt132
Ä with Alt142
ß with Alt225
NumLock must be on.
 Users of Apple might want to try Altu (which gives you a ¨) followed by u, o, etc. or s. Works for capitals as well.
– Fritz Jörn (talk) 10:35, 31 October 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: On an American keyboard in international lay-out, one can type a double quote (, which will not appear) followed by a letter. If dots can be placed on the letter, it will result in one glyph (e.g.  will result in ä,  in ë,  in ï,  in ö,  in ü). If not, the two will both appear ("x). To input a double quote by itself (or followed by a letter on which dots would be possible but are not desired), one can type double quote followed by a space:  will result in "a. Similar effect can be achieved with single quotes (), backquotes () and tildes (). Also, the 'alt' key on the right hand side of the keyboard (sometimes labeled 'alt gr') can be used to enter some extra charactersr. + will result in ß. Richard 08:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: If I understand the system of the alt codes correctly, then suggesting the codes with a leading zero would be safer (for instance the sequence , , , , and  for producing ⟨ü⟩). The alt codes that do not use the leading zero refer to the current code page, so in some cases, they might produce other characters. --mach 🙈🙉🙊 11:23, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: Yet another reason why I don't use alt codes ;) Richard 12:25, 3 November 2014 (UTC)

text: PS:  was just the template I was looking for... thanks! Richard 12:25, 3 November 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Typing Umlauts 

message: This article refers to there being two main ways to spell German, the Heyes fashion and the Abel fashion. Another article, on the history of the eszett, contrasts the Heyes orthography with the Adelung orthography. Perhaps the Heyes orthography had two different rivals in two different historical periods, but without additional details I begin to suspect a typographical error. Quadibloc (talk) 17:07, 20 July 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Abel or Adelard 

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thread_title:  External links modified 

message: Can learn the IPA and compare with historical and prehistorical usage. this applies with Armenian as well. RCNesland (talk) 13:06, 21 November 2017 (UTC)
replies: text: I have no idea what you're getting at... Richard 08:37, 22 November 2017 (UTC)
thread_title: Shortcut

message: I removed the text claiming that the Rat fuer deutsche Rechtschreibung considers these "official letters". The text there says:  This does not imply that they are considered official letters, especially considering that they can all be replaced under certain circumstances and are alphabetized with the letter they are modified from.--Ermenrich (talk) 23:22, 11 September 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Umlauted vowels as letters