Germans balk at effort to simplify their spelling rules

The nice thing about English is that it's non-inflected. But it's so close to German that an English speaker should have no problem with German, except for its impossible grammar. In English, for example (with a very few exceptions) people, animals and children are male or female; everything else is neuter. In German every inanimate object has a gender ascribed to it, and there are no rules for determining which gender it is, other than simply knowing it by rote.

Germans have keyboards that produce the Esszet as well as the umlauts (ä, ö, ü).

You should see a Swiss Keyboard!! They have both the german AND the french special characters on the same keys!!!

This nonsense has been going on over here for years now - it's quite silly.

There was recently a proposal to let the people decide by referendum - the gal responsible refused - commenting that the people have "more important" things to worry about a shouldn't be bothered.

Funny thing though is that, instead of "simplfiying" the rules, they have only succeeded in creating exceptions.

German used to be easy to learn because everything was spelled according to defined rules with very few exceptions. Even the adjective endings are easy if you follow ~5 rules.

Now, everything is confused.

For example, the combation "ph" (as is Physics, dolphin, etc...) is to be replaced with "f". So, "delphin" becomes "delfin", but Philisophie remains unchanged - WHY?? - because it is an "ancient" word and the reformers didn't "dare" change it!!

So, learning to spell, now becomes a matter of memory instead of a matter of pronunciation / rules.

What did Germans do when using computers that cannot produce the esszet character?

Any modern computer can produce them even if the keyboard is not specifically set up for them.

To type letters with umlauts or accents on Windows, hold down the ALT key and then type the appropriate numbers on the numeric keypad (NOT the numbers across top of keyboard). Let go of the ALT key and the letter will then appear.

(Hold down ALT key) + 225 (Let go of ALT key) = ß

For German:

ä - 132
ë - 137
ö - 148
ü - 129
ß - 225
Ä - 142
Ö - 153
Ü - 154

For Spanish:

á - 160
é - 130
í - 161
ó - 162
ú - 163
Á - 0193
É - 0201
Í - 0205
Ó - 0211
Ú - 0218
ñ - 164
Ñ - 165
¿ -168

Any modern computer can produce them even if the keyboard is not specifically set up for them.

Windows boxes can produce that character, and I believe it's in the Macintosh character set as well, but prior to code page support MS-DOS based machines could not produce it (and even then, EGA/VGA displays could show it but CGA/MDA displays could not).

To be sure, almost all computing is done with GUI-boxes, but there are still applications that use ASCII terminals or whose character sets don't include the esszet character.

BTW, note that Alt-224 is an alpha and Alt-226 is a Gamma. What do you suppose Alt-225 might have been on the PC character set before Microsoft stuck the esszet there?

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