Germans in a tangle over how to spell spaghetti

Worried about mounting unemployment, unsettled by the government's tough economic reforms and saturated by reports about the decline of their country, Germans could soon have something else to worry about: how to spell "spaghetti".

Two of the country's largest publishers said recently they would abandon an eight-year reform of the German language and revert to old-style spelling, a decision that critics said could cause chaos weeks before the back-to-school season.

But Axel Springer, publisher of the mass-market Bild Zeitung daily, and Spiegel-Verlag, publisher of the news magazine, said their decision was in no way symptomatic of an ingrained German reluctance to embrace change.

"We are pushing for urgent, necessary, sensible reforms in our society," Mathias Döpfner, Chief Executive of Axel Springer, said. "The spelling reform, however, was no reform but a step back."

Opponents of the measure, adopted by Germany's 16 Länder, or states, and other German-speaking countries in 1996, see its origin in another German trait: the well-documented propensity to over-regulate.

Some simplifications were adopted, cutting the compendium of othrography rules from 212 to 112. The use of compound words, sush as the infamous Steuervergünstigungabbaugesetz - law on the abolition of tax rebates - was also discouraged.

But other moves proved more contestable, such as the addition of double consonants to certain words - "Tip" becoming "Tipp" - or even triple ones, as in "Balletttänzer" - ballet dancer - and the optional "Germanisation" of foreign words - spaghetti becoming Spagetti.

Springer and Spiegel said the test period of the past five years had shown little acceptance in the public, while prominent fiction writers had largely ignored the reform. "For the sake of future generations, this state-sponsored dyslexia must now come to an end."

While politicians, who have no power to enforce the contested rules, criticised the publishers' retreat, some media said they would consult their readers.

The country's two main quality broadsheets - the Süddeutsche Zeitung and the Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung - have or will revert to the old spelling form.

It was left to Helmut Markwort, editor of the Focus magazine, to strike a dissonant note. Did Germany not have, he asked, enough "urgent problems for a new debate about orthography rules"

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