A farewell

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Photo: Duden website excerpt | © Duden

Do you still know the Duden, I mean the one reliable work for improving the German language, which was available at least once in every reasonable household?

Konrad Duden created the spelling dictionary that is named after him in 1872 and thus significantly influenced the development of a uniform spelling in the German-speaking world.

Since I began my own school days with an alleged weakness in reading and writing, although I am convinced that it was only due to the linguistic re-education efforts of young teachers from the northern German-speaking area who, with brute force, expelled West Franconian - our actual mother tongue - from us my parents gave me a dictionary very early on. They then had more success when they organized a reading circle for us children.

In any case, my curiosity was aroused and I kept looking for the oldest existing Duden in the bookshelves, where I also got to know the Sütterlin script.

At the beginning of my professional life, which began in the Bonn Republic, the Duden was "law" in all federal authorities, and the Duden editors also insisted on promoting the German language with their own "hotline". I have fond memories of the phone calls to volunteer linguists, who explained even the finest nuances in language, and in my case mostly correct commas.

I also like to remember the very controversial discussions with my sister, who was studying German at the time, and explained to me that language is constantly changing and cannot be cemented; this could also be proven in the Duden of various editions.

Probably thanks to the extensive linguistic re-education attempts at German schools and the political realization that overqualification of the citizens is not only disadvantageous for the industry, since the 1970s there has been an increasing linguistic impoverishment in our countries, whereby the dative and the genitive fell victim to what was now arbitrary.

With the spelling reform carried out by the Berlin Republic in 1996 and since then constantly corrected, the German language slipped completely into the non-binding, whereby politics was only guided by the idea of ​​simplification in order to follow the linguistic poverty with intellectual poverty, because "only the dumbest calves choose their own slaughterers.”

But anyone who believed that one could no longer increase these purely politically motivated interventions in our language, which, by the way, is the "operating system" of our society, has his George Orwell not read, who warned against Newspeak as early as 1949.

This Newspeak has been demanded and promoted in unison by the larger political parties for a few years now and has now also been reproduced in the dictionary, whereby it not only leaves linguistics, but also precedes the most industrious party ideologues.

From one of Konrad Duden The work developed to strengthen our society and make it come of age has now become an ideological tool for creating a new world - the German language will certainly survive this, but the Duden has become completely superfluous.

“Who is this Herr Konrad Duden anyway? Some chair fart!”

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, As superfluous as a goiter (14.10.1996)

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