Information Law Possum (discontinued)

One of the many benefits of Google is, as we all know, the possibility to do “grammatical plebiscites”, i.e. comparing the number of hits searches for two different spellings of a word or for two phrases yield.

My question was how “wrong” it is to spell the German word for case law, “Rechtsprechung”, with two s (”Rechtssprechung”)–a spelling that could be explained grammatically but isn’t mentioned in the Duden (the German dictionary with semi-official authority).

Here are the results (in thousands):

site:      “Rechtsprechung”       “Rechtssprechung”

.de        5′770 (90%)               649 (10%)

.ch        1′110 (96%)               49 (4%)

.at         239 (79%)                 62 (21%)

Assuming that people who talk about case law have the same mean level of education in grammar in the Switzerland, Germany and Austria, it appears that the spelling with “ss” is more acceptable in the Austrian variety of standard German than in the Swiss and the German varieties. (These varieties are less distinct in spelling than American and British English, and they are not the same as the many Swiss, German and Austrian dialects, which in general are only spoken languages.”

So, the Duden editors might consider adding the Austrian minority spelling in the next edition of the dictionary.

Interesting, isn’t it? 8-)