Welcome to my internet pages!
I am a linguist originating from Schleswig-Holstein, the northernmost Bundesland of the Federal Republic of Germany, with four indigenous languages: Platt, Frisian, Danish and German (though the last one is of course new in this area). My interests cover phonetics, morphology and syntax from a typological point of view and from a historical perspective. An important area of research is sound laws. I have been able to detect several ones of them, bring them into their final form, or make proposals.
This page can unfortunately not replace the information provided for the most part in German on the other pages, but it can give a summary. It should be stressed how important the German language still is and continues to be in linguistic research. This is not valid for all branches of the investigation of language. In recent publications on African linguistics, e. g., I wrote in English, too. German is, however, very big in Indo-European and Uralic linguistics, two fields that many of my articles belong to.
One of my greatest concerns is an orthography reform that is being forced upon the German people. The matter is especially severe with our school children who are going to score "mistakes" from August 1st, 2006 onwards for spelling German the usual way. Arguments against the reform include:
- More than 90 per cent of the people are against the reform (polls vary).
- The orthography reform is objected by the most famous authors and all serious linguists. It is not followed by many leading newspapers.
- Large parts of the reform are simply a take-over of an orthography reform that was planned by the Nazis in 1944 but which did not see the light of day due to the end of the war.
--- Correction 8.9.2005: It turned out now that "large parts" is even a too mild way to put it: About 95% of the changes were already part of the Nazi reform! ---
Text about this issue
- Most of the new spelling rules simply do not make sense.
- The reform is an act of oppression of our culture.