Pile of letters

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Piling up of letters in the inscription in Albrecht Dürer's woodcut Rhinocerus (1515), e.g. B. Heil ff andt (elephant)

Under Letternhäufelung (: Letterhäufelung also) refers to the case of additional sounds in the typeface of the German language that does not change the pronunciation. The pile of letters appeared in early New High German, which was not yet orthographically regulated , and was continued into the 17th and 18th centuries. It was mainly this doubles the consonant or strengthened, it is said, for example Krä ff tig , her tz crane ck and Ar tz ney . In today's typeface, these words only have one consonant at the corresponding point, but are not pronounced differently. However, some of these spellings, e.g. B. City, has been preserved to this day.

See also

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter von Polenz : German language history from the late Middle Ages to the present . de Gruyter, 1991, ISBN 3-11-013436-5 , pp. 243 ( Online Google Books).