The German spelling reform joke

I need to congratulate Edmund Stoiber and Jürgen Rüttgers, Ministerpräsidenten (Governors, sort of) of states Bavaria and Nordrhein-Westfalen for delaying the infamous spelling reform of the German language. Demonstrates guts and is the right thing to do. The spelling reform is a huge waste of time, energy, money and every other resource and pretty much DOA. Whoever came up with this idea in the first place must have been smoking something. To make a language “easier” is a nice idea, but at what cost? I, for one, will not adopt it. Period. Luckily, I don’t get grades anymore, but our kids are nothing but suffering from this idiotic project. Maybe it’s a German thing to make it “easier” for everybody else, and forget about our heritage, our own people, those billions of books that suddenly contain misspelled words, and the fact that adults and seniors wouldn’t simply switch to new spellings. Let’s compare this with our neighbouring countries and “allies”? Would the British or French (parbleu!) even think about changing their language, because non-English or non-French speaking people would find it easier to learn or pronounce? NFW. (Right, Dale?)

Case in point (French): Can you say 98 in French? Quatre-vingt-dix-huit. Four (times) twenty ten eight? Oh hell. The funny thing is, the French don’t even notice this ridiculous arithmetic formula. BTW, the Swiss make it a lot easier by saying “nonnante huit”, ninety eight.

Case in point 2 (English): Consider the word ending “…ough”. Now that’s a candidate for reform, given that there are so many different ways to pronounce this. For example, thr-ough, thor-ough, pl-ough, r-ough. All different, yet nobody would think about making these words pronounced in a consistent way.