Commonly misspelled words in German Commonly misspelled words in German Misspellings in German are a subcategory of orthographical errors (German: "Rechtschreibfehler"), counter the rules of German orthography. Although there is some variance following the current 'optional' status of the German spelling reform of 1996. Misspelling in German is less common than in English since most words are spelled as they are pronounced. Exceptions however occur, as for the (in modern German) identical "ä" and "e" both representing the IPA [ε] sound. Confusion can also occur with homonyms as verb prefixes: "wiederspiegeln" (incorrect) vs. "widerspiegeln" (correct). Misspellings of German words, outside Germany, also occur - for
Representation (arts) example, in English the written letter "a" represents different phonetic sounds depending on which word it is written in. The letter "a" has a different sound in the word in each of the following words, "apple", "gate", "margarine" and "beat", therefore, how is a person unaware of the phonemic sounds, able to pronounce the word properly by simply looking at alphabetic spelling. The way the word is represented on paper is not always the way the word would be represented phonetically. This leads to common misrepresentations of the phonemic sounds of speech and suggests that the writing system does not