It is said of the West Frisians that, if anyone attacks their language, they will man the barricades, but even on the barricades they will continue their squabbles about the orthography (Jorgensen, 1979). The same applies to the North Frisians. The present North Frisian orthographic system states that all long vowels shall be written with a double vowel, e.g. naame [na:m~] "to take", and short vowels with ~ single vowel, e.g. ham (ham] "him". No consonants can be doubled. This is in contrast to the German orthographic system where short vowels are indicated by a doubling of the following consonant, e.g. Butter, Holle, and long vowels are followed by a single consonant or a length symbol such as h in Mehl or e as in Sieg. Arhammar (1976) considers that this radical deviation from the dominant language's _J norm is to emphasize Frisian's independent identity. This orthographic principle has been widely accepted although one symbol has caused some trouble. As the mainland dialects are characterized by an abundance of vowel phonemes, the symbol ii was introduced in the phonemes /A/ and /Ml to differentiate them from the phonemes /oo/ = [o:) and /oo/ = {~:),the latter two phonemes being examples of the desired principle of one phoneme one grapheme not being fulfilled as each phoneme is written oo. As, however, Danish also uses the symbol a as in Arhus, some Frisians rejected the orthography as they considered it too Danish. A further more serious argument, however, evolved around the discussion whether or not nouns should be written with a capital letter as in German. One argument forwarded was that all children are used to the German orthography and that it must be pedagogically sensible to use the same principles in Frisian i.e. the orthographic principles a child is used to in his literacy L1 should be transferred to his literacy L2. The counter argument was that all other languages in Europe use small letters for nouns, such as English, which the children also learn at school. This "pedagogical" argument was in fact a political one, as the German-oriented Frisians saw the noun with the capital letter as their last bastion of German identity in the Frisian orthography. Thus dissimilarity from German is sought by that group striving for a degree of Frisian autonomy and similarity is desired by that group which wishes to see Frisian firmly clutched to the bosom of the German state. At present a certain form of anarchy reigns as each group publishes its works according to its own principles.