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 .,- 1
(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.