THROW away your German text books. As of today, some of the iron rules governing the language of Goethe and Klinsmann are no longer valid. Of the 212 existing spelling regulations, for instance, only 112 will remain.
That's the good news. The bad news is that, while the number of rules may have been reduced, the number of exceptions has gone up proportionately, and the cumbersome grammar that has driven generations of students to despair has survived the latest attempt to reform the language.
Since 1901, the best brains of the German speaking world have been pruning Hochdeutsch in an effort to bring order to their Babel of vernaculars and dialects. A mere 95 years later, government officials of Austria, Liechtenstein, Switzerland and Germany signed an agreement yesterday to lay down the new rules.
As one might expect when so many different parties are involved Germany's united front was undermined by its bickering 16 Lauder the academics' early revolutionary zest has petered out into a stream of feeble compromises. The Swiss had already abolished the "ss" character because they could not find room for it on their multilingual keyboards.
In their search for purity, the academics purging German have discarded many foreign imports, such as Midlifecrisis and Sex appeal, while others have been Germanised by acquiring a letter or two.
More radical proposals have been thrown out. Nouns will still begin with a capital letter, the verb in convoluted sentences will remain at the end, and the gender rules have been only slightly simplified. Dogs will stay male, cats female and girls neuter.
Nor have the reforms resolved the age old endeavour for linguistic uniformity among the three main German speaking countries.
When Austria joined the EU last year, it came with a dowry of 23 Austricisms, resisted by Germany to the bitter end during the accession talks. Those words are now accepted by the EU, but still missing from dictionaries printed in the Federal Republic.
The Austrian dialect at least resembles standard German, unlike the language spoken by Swiss Germans. Switzerland is very proud of its version of Hochdeutsch, even though it bears no resemblance to the language spoken in Zurich's cafes. Swiss films are subtitled in Germany because Germans simply do not understand the dialogue.
The Germans themselves remain divided by their common tongue. Apart from the Bavarians' impenetrable pronunciation, common words spoken in one region can be incomprehensible 100 miles away.
But at least they have all written the same way until now. The new rules will be taught in schools from the autumn and introduced officially in 1998. Then there will be a seven year period of chaos, when the two systems will live side by side. Only in 2005 will bureaucrats risk losing their jobs by putting too many commas in their memos.