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RE: [Puzzle|WordSearch]STEM Saturday #25 Promoted Post Word Search
ALMA studies nebulae, very young stars and protoplanetary disks, exoplanets, brown dwarfs, solar system objects, and distant GALAXIES.
Brown dwarfs?! Never heard before :-))
I've heard of them, but had to look them up to remember what they were. I also didn't know that "dwarfs" is the correct spelling (as opposed to "dwarves").
I guess it’s just the difference between Oxford and American English:
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/american_english/dwarf_1
CC @moecki (das ist der englische „Duden“… )
Exciting! (but off-topic) A writer thinks up a new way of writing that gradually finds its way into everyday use.... So this obviously exists in every language...
Was there something like a "spelling reform" in English (like in German few years ago), where official rules are changed?
I'm not aware of any large scale effort like that. There are various "style guides" (MLA, APA, etc..) that get updated periodically, and of course the dictionaries change every year, but nothing that I would consider to be a "reform" effort.
It doesn't happen so often in German either, but some rules were fundamentally changed during the last reform. The intention was partly to simplify the rules or to adapt them to usage.
Whether the intentions were achieved in this way is another matter. In any case, the reform was very controversial.
I actually have some coworkers in Germany and one of them had mentioned a language reform effort where they were trying to make the language genderless. Not sure if that's the same one you're mentioning or not.
I'm struggling to learn the gendered version of the language in DuoLingo, so I really hope I don't go through all this effort just to have them throw some other version of the language at me. ;-)
This is a very sensitive issue. This development is controversial and does not concern spelling or grammar. But it's not the same one.
The German language is already difficult enough for foreign speakers. I think you only need the gendered version if it is considered necessary for the business relationship.
I don't think I'll ever be able to speak or write in German, but I'm hoping to get to the point where I can read the German language email threads that sometimes land my inbox, so hopefully it will be slow to change. ;-)