[Magdalen] Music question

[Scott Knitter]

Update: Obviously to those who know modern German well (I'm trying,
but...), I was a German major before "der neuen Rechtschreibung," the
new orthography. The students who gave the problematic
pretending-to-rhyme name to the conversation group would in 2016 be
spelling it "Fass und Spaß," demonstrating their awareness of the
difference between a short a and a long a. One of the new rules is
that ß is used after only long vowels, not short ones. The latter get
an ss instead.

I found out because I was just looking up the new rule that says if
you put two words together (which is done a LOT, hence the many very
long words that are really just small words shoved together--a phrase
as a word)--anyhow, if you put two words together and this results in
three of the same letter in a row, you must now keep all of them,
where before one was dropped. So "chopsticks" is literally "eating
little-sticks," or Essstäbchen. Yes, three s's cuz the E at the
beginning is short. Previously it would have been Eßstäbchen. A bear
to pronounce, too. No kind pronunciation helps like Welsh's mutations.

OK, time for bed now. I taught high-school German for a year but
couldn't do so now without a thorough grounding in the new
orthography. Imagine a proclamation that new spelling rules will apply
in English, nationwide or worldwide, from 01 January. Americans are to
write "colour" and "labour" like everyone else. No arrests for
noncompliance, but you'd be spelling things wrong that were right
before.

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 10:09 AM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com> wrote:
> A student German-conversation group at Michigan State while I was
> there decided to name themselves "Faß und Spaß" ("Draught and
> Fun"--they met in pubs to chat in German), thinking it a clever
> rhyming pair. Mostly, it is. But one of the German professors was
> practically apoplectic in his denunciation of the name, pointing out
> that the 'a' in Faß (sounds like the English word "fuss") is short
> while the one in Spaß ("shpahss") is long, and he didn't want native
> German speakers to think MSU's German department would sit idly by
> while students erroneously rhymed a short vowel with a long one.




-- 
Scott R. Knitter
Edgewater, Chicago, Illinois USA