Musa for German

German is an easy language to read, once you know how the letters are pronounced, but there are often multiple ways to write the same sounds. For example, the common surname Mayer could also be spelled Meyer Maier Meier Majer Mejer Mayr Meyr (and more). Walther Burckhardt could also be Walter Burkhart, and so on.

In addition, there are a number of di- and tri-graphs - ch ng sch dsch tsch ss - and a diaeresis, also known as an umlaut or trema, over ä ö ü which may or may not disappear when capitalized, or sometimes turn into an e. And sometimes ss or sz is written as ß, which has no uppercase form.

German distinguishes long and short vowels, but there's no consistent way to represent this. Long vowels may be written with a following h, while short vowels may be indicated by doubling the following consonant. Or long vowels may simply be doubled, although ie is used instead of ii.

There are also sound changes that aren't spelled, like the devoicing of b d g v z zh to p t k f s sh at the end of syllables. The digraph ch represents x after back vowels, but ç after front vowels or at the beginning of a syllable (only in the suffix -chen). The clusters sp st are also pronounced shp sht as in Spiel Stein.

Finally, there are two oddities for which German spelling is notorious: capitalization of nouns, and the creation of compound nouns. The former is merely quaint, while the latter seems incomprehensible until you realize that we do the same thing in English...but with spaces separating each word. Isn't golf cart easier to read than Golfplatzfahrzeug?

All these problems are solved by Musa. Every sound has its own letter, although long vowels use the Long mark and diphthongs use a semivowel. When pronunciation changes in a certain situation, the spelling reflects that. And compound words are written with spaces between components.

Consonants

There are 25 consonants, plus 3 more used only in foreign words (in italics).

	müssen		nein						eng
	packen		tanken						kommen
	backen sparren knapp Dieb		danken standen Brot Bad		zwanzig		Tscheche		gehen Sack Weg
	geben		baden				Dschungel		Lager
	fahren		ich		essen		schön		acht
	waren				Hosen		Jalousie		Rohr
			liegen		ja		haben

Like English (but not Dutch), German controls the voicing of plosives and s at a more abstract level than most languages. Instead of being merely voiced, unvoiced, and/or aspirated, each phoneme varies among those voices depending on the context. The affected consonants come in pairs called fortis and lenis, and this is what is spelled in the current orthography:

Fortis	p	t	k	ss
Lenis	b	d	g	s

The affricates pf z tsch and the fricatives f sch ch sounds don't participate - the voiced versions (except for v) never occur in native words.

The specific rules vary widely between dialects. Here are the rules we use for Standard Hochdeutsch:

• At the beginning of a syllable, the fortis stops p t k are aspirated, and we write them with the aspirated letters above: packen tanken kommen. When the syllable is stressed, this aspiration is stronger, but it's audible even in unstressed syllables.
• When one of these fortis stops follows an s at the beginning of a syllable, it's written with the unvoiced letters above: sparren standen (sk doesn't occur in German).
• At the end of a syllable (after the vowel), these fortis stops are weakly aspirated, but we still write them with unvoiced letters: knapp Brot Sack.
• The corresponding lenis stops and s are usually devoiced at the beginning of a word (backen danken geben sehen), at the end of a word (Dieb Bad Weg Haus), or even after an unvoiced consonant in the middle of a word (Hausbau Dresden Ausgang Absicht). In those cases, we write them with the same unvoiced letters as the fortis stops.
• Otherwise, they're voiced, and we write them with the voiced letters above: geben baden Lager Hosen. But in southern dialects, the lenis sounds are always unvoiced.
• According to these rules, there's no written distinction between fortis and lenis at the end of a word: Rat and Rad sound alike. But in some dialects there's a slight audible difference between weakly aspirated fortis and weakly voiced lenis. If you want to record that, use the aspirated letters for fortis finals, too.

Vowels

Here are the German vowels :

	bitten		bieten
	Betten		beten
	Männer		bäten		weiten
	Wasser		baten		Bauten
	Bütten		wüten
	Böttingen		böten
	Bottich		Booten		Beute
	Butten		buhten
	einer		eine einen eines

There are 7 short vowels, 8 long vowels, 3 diphthongs, and 2 reduced vowels for unstressed syllables. As in English, the distinction between long and short vowels is more one of tenseness than length.

Samples

Now that you've learned the letters, why don't you try reading a sentence?



Laufet, Brüder, eure Bahn, Freudig, wie ein Held zum Siegen.