On Thu, 16 Dec 2004, David Dyer-Bennet wrote: > Philip Hart <philiph at slac.stanford.edu> writes: > > > Spelling is certainly painful in English - but have you ever tried to use > > a comma correctly in German? > > Well, that's an interesting question. I lived in Zurich in 1966-67 > [...] I don't recall that commas were particularly an issue in German, > though. [...] An aquaintance is a German German teacher - there was recently a reorganization of the official comma rules (from 108 to 27) and she didn't know a lot of them. There used to be a contest something along the lines of "Write down the dictated front page of the newspaper Dings correctly". The winner was the one who made the fewest errors in punctuation and capitalization and word separation etc.