[Magdalen] Music question

[James Oppenheimer-Crawford]

Well, I certainly learned a couple of things here!

James W. Oppenheimer-Crawford
*“A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved,
except in memory. LLAP**”  -- *Leonard Nimoy

On Fri, Nov 18, 2016 at 11:57 PM, Scott Knitter <scottknitter at gmail.com>
wrote:

> 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
>