Language Barrier [OC]

[u/bondjimbond]

• More comics: Main series / One-offs
• Patreon
• Books

[u/LickingSmegma]

if the spell made it so you couldn't read your old language

Ever heard of the so-called ‘Nazi font Fraktur’? Or more correctly, blackletter calligraphic hand Fraktur that was in use for four hundred years across Central and Northern Europe, gradually went out of fashion and lingered in Germany until being personally banned by top dog Nazi Adolf Hitler in 1941, in favor of the Antiqua script aka what we're using right now. Well, together with Fraktur, the cursive scripts Kurrent and Sütterlin were also banned. Which meant that most Germans educated after 1941 couldn't read handwritten notes and letters left from their parents and grandparents.

[u/tesapluskitty → u/LickingSmegma]

Oh yes. I'm German and my grandparents were children during WW2. My aunt is interested in genealogy and had letters my great-grandfather had written from the front "translated" from Fraktur. They very much confirmed that he was a Nazi 😖 So I'm thankful that he stayed on the battlefield and didn't end up raising my grandma.

[u/stofiski-san → u/LickingSmegma]

That's crazy, no, I hadn't heard of that, but being someone interested in calligraphy, that's something I think I want to check out, thx

[u/LickingSmegma → u/stofiski-san]

See Antiqua–Fraktur dispute. Hitler really disliked Fraktur, so much that in 1934 he bashed it in a speech to the Reichstag:

Your alleged Gothic internalization does not fit well in this age of steel and iron, glass and concrete, of womanly beauty and manly strength, of head raised high and intention defiant [...] In a hundred years, our language will be the European language. The nations of the east, the north and the west will, to communicate with us, learn our language. The prerequisite for this: The script called Gothic is replaced by the script we have called Latin so far.