Why "Postwerthzeichen" In German, Rather Than "Postwertzeichen"?

Hi,
There are a few books on German philately, printed around 1900 or before, that use the word "Postwerthzeichen" (meaning postage stamps in English) instead of the far more common spelling "Postwertzeichen". I have included two examples below.





It is clearly not a spelling mistake so I would like to know if this is simply an uncommon, but valid alternative spelling, or maybe it is a grammatical twist of some sort? It is possible that the word, being only a few decades old, did not have a settled spelling yet, but there are miles of other publications from around that period all with the "Postwertzeichen" spelling, and that is the only spelling I can find in the dictionaries, however old.

Lastly, I need not point out (but I will anyway) that I know very little German, and so my guesses may be completely off track. Whatever the cause of the additional "h" I would be most grateful for any insights.

This was due to changes in the spelling of some German words resulting from the German Orthographic Conference of 1901. One of the changes dropped the 'h' in German words containing 'th'.

So 'Postwerthzeichen' became 'Postwertzeichen'.

The changes became official in 1902,

Dale

"This will address complaints about our long words", they said.

Thank you very much for the explanation. I see the same 1901 conference that removed the 'h' from certain words, also was responsible for changing the rules for the use of 'ss' and 'sz', and those rules themselves are now modified with the 1996 changes.
Although it shed no light on the removed 'h', this is a good reference to use:

Hi indigo,

There's a discussion of the proposed changes in this German language article on Wikipedia:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ortho...enz_von_1901

Here's one of the bullet points from the article covering the change mentioned by Dale:

"In heimischen Wörtern sollte das h nach t grundsätzlich fallen (Tal, Tür statt Thal, Thür). In Fremdwörtern wie Thron und Theater sowie germanischen Begriffen wie Thing und Thor wurde die th-Schreibung beibehalten."

Thanks Dale for this information. I hadn't heard before about this 1901 conference or its predecessor.

Nice one Geoff!