Search for the "d"

Reinling or Reindling, that is the question here

The crucial question about the "d"...(Bild: Kärnten Museum)

Almost 100 percent of Carinthians like to eat it, about half of them bake it, it is part of Easter, but how do you spell it? Reinling or Reindling? The "Krone" is looking for the answer.

With or without nuts - that is always a hotly debated question about the typical Carinthian yeast dough pastry Reinling. Or Reindling?

"The pastry gets its name from its baking tin: the Rein," says Roland Bäck, historian and head of the education department at the Carinthia Museum. The Duden, the "German teacher's bible", the standard work of the German language, which has formed the basis of standardized German spelling since 1880, also knows the Rein. According to Duden, the term is mainly used in Bavarian and Austrian, the plural is die Reinen.

Manuela Pichler: "I've often thought about the 'd'."(Bild: LWK)

"It's a rather flat, round baking vessel," explains Lisa Jestl from the education department at the open-air museum in Maria Saal: "And there's a ban on holes!" Because a Carinthian Rein(d)ling is not typically baked in a Bundt pan. Manuela Pichler, project manager of the Carinthian Seminar Farmers' Association, confirms this: "But baking in a Rein is more difficult. The hole in the Gugelhupf tin makes it easier to bake the dough thoroughly. The heat is transferred differently."

She has often thought about the question of the "d": "Because the word comes from Rein, it should be Reinling, but you often read about Reindling in old recipes. Where the d comes from is inexplicable to me. But we also decided to spell it with a d."

Roland Bäck: "The term comes from Rein."(Bild: Uta Rojsek-Wiedergut)

This is also recommended by the Duden dictionary, which knows Rein, but not Reinling, but Reindling.

The next stop in the search for an answer is the temple of knowledge, the Alpen-Adria-Universität Klagenfurt. "Reinling would be linguistically correct. However, as Rein is a dialectal expression that is ultimately mainly used orally, the laws of articulatory economy apply here. In short: Reindling is 'easier' for dialect speakers to articulate, as the syllable Rein is weakly pronounced; with the d, the transition to -ling is clearer and easier to articulate. Analogous examples can be found in standard German: "One speaks of morning exercises and not of 'morgenlichen'," explains linguist Jürgen Struger.

The d therefore only serves the flow of speech; with d, the word comes out of the mouth just as quickly as a good Reindling - with or without nuts - goes in.