User:J. 'mach' wust

I live in the city of Berne in Switzerland, and so I speak the Alemannic dialect of Berne: Bernese German, which has the rare feature among Germanic languages that consonant and vowel length are independent from each other.

German orthography

Bravo for your edit of 02:45, 13 March 2006. Your English is excellent, but here and there are some minor issues.

In the title, History of the German Orthography, English does not use the definite article for intangibles (History of Medicine, History of American Literature) and so I've removed it.

The second issue concerns this sentence:

In the following centuries, the only variety that showed a marked tendency to be used overregionally was the Middle Low German of the Hanseatic League, based on the variety of Lübeck and used in many areas of Northern Germany.

There is no such word as overregional in English. Were you thinking ueberregionalisch or some such concept here, perhaps? You could use "interregionally", which does exist and wouldn't be wrong, but it isn't used much. A typical formulation here in English might be, 'across different regions', at least for the first occurrence, so that's how I've left it. In a couple of other cases, I put "interregional" and in others I substituted "common" instead, which seemed to fit the meaning there, and is shorter than repeating the same word again.

But please check it out, and feel free to substitute 'interregionally' if you feel it better captures the idea you were trying to express, as long as you get the fact that an English-speaking reader may not have seen this word before.

By the way, I first came across this article from the Wiki requests for translations page, but this doesn't seem to be a translation of the Deutsche Rechtschreibung page at all, in fact, it has almost nothing to do with it. Which is fine, as the article is a good one about its own topic, but I question the inclusion of the interwiki 'Deutsch' link pointing to the Rechtschreibung article, which I think should be removed. Is there a German Orthography article of which this is a translation?

Finally, many non-students of linguistics might be very interested in finding this article in Wiki. Unfortunately, the word 'orthography' in English, unlike its cognates in German, Fr, Es, etc., is a specialist's term, and many users would surely search under the phrase 'German spelling'. This, however, will not turn up any references to this article, although it should. Maybe we could create a new disambiguation page, or redirect page (I haven't done this yet so I have to learn how) in which the search 'German spelling' would allow the user to choose the page he actually wanted--whether this one, or the English version of Rechtschreibreform, or whatever they were actually looking for. Mathglot 06:11, 26 December 2006 (UTC)