Why is "Tschüß" not accepted for "Tschüss"?
I have come across this several times in the tutorials. Words that Germans use all time, but are not accepted in the tutorials.
How does someone contact duolingo about these situations? There has to be some kind of feedback system or duolingo will continue to be inadequate.
13 Comments
This answer is surprisingly political!
"Tschüß" is an older form, reflecting a pre-1996 reform. In 1996 a reform was made that greatly reduced the prevalence of the "ß" character in most German writing. After the reform, it's only used following a long vowel. The ü in "tschüss" is short, so the proper way to write it, according to this reform, is with the "ss". After this reform, "Tschüß" is now considered a wrong or incorrect way to spell this word, but in practice, not everyone follows this reform.
See here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_orthography_reform_of_1996
So DuoLingo is "correct" in enforcing this, according to that reform.
It's common to find old writings in German using the ß, although a little less common on the web. There was active resistance to this reform...it was very unpopular at the time and has remained fairly unpopular, especially with the older generations.
There was a bit of back and forth with this reform, at first a lot of changes were made, and after some time some of them were taken back or both variants are now possible.
This led to a lof of confusion, resulting in a lot of adults refusing to change their writing and still using the old orthography today, or a mixture of both.
Tschüß is the old version before the writing reform. So I believe in modern German tschüss is the only correct way of writing it but I can't be 100% sure.
Yes, you're right! But as cazort said, "ss" follows a short vowel and "ß" follows a long vowel. So the word Tschüß is still used to represent the pronounce of the long ü.
Here's a link: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/tsch%c3%bc%c3%9f
It is both short and long, and the length depends on dialect (and thus also on the spelling). The course teaches toward the currently accepted spelling, so there is no likelihood of tschüß being accepted in the course. To be clear, it is not 'wrong' perse, but it is not what the volunteers (some of which are indeed native speakers of German and thus would have more knowledge on the matter and be in a position to make a more appropriate decision) want to teach learners of German.
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Report it; DL should reflect common usage, not enforce recent, top-down spelling reforms which many people do not adhere to. I am sure I have come across questions where this spelling is accepted, anyway.
The French course certainly accepts lots of spellings that have technically been changed by legislation. Spelling reforms do not instantaneously change the way everyone spells, so courses should accept all forms of a word in current use (which are what a learner will actually encounter in the wild).
Several of my German FB friends still spell it as Tschüß. I mentioned once in Facebook I never really noticed the spelling change with the reform and at least one German said she still spells it that way. ;-)
Yup. I didn't know either until I googled it even though I grew up with the new spelling system.
According to the Duden, "tschüss" and "tschüs" are both acceptable. https://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/Tschuess As EmperorIguana42 already mentioned, "tschüß" is an outdated form.
You can use the report button, if you want to correct wrong spelling or translations in a sentence. As for the Tips & Notes, I'm not sure how to report it. Maybe contact a mod?
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In the lower left hand corner is a button that says report. You usually can choose "my answer should be accepted" Eventually, someone will look at it. If your change is accepted, you will get an e-mail message.
Just asked another German on Facebook about his thoughts on this. This is what he said....
There is no binding rule for that, as it is only spoken language,... not a regular term ... mostly in the north of Germany.. a shortly pronounced vowel is followed by a double "S".... to show that it is pronounced shortly... longer vowels are followed by a single s or an ß...
