[owlmirror]

Making sure that an academic or honorific title is correctly interpreted in a German data models is a little project in itself. I once had the pleasure to write out the business logic that generates the correct honorific address for printed letters. It was surprising how much time we spend on that part and how often it had to be revised because of some special exception or case no one had thought about. To give you an Idea, every class: clergy, government administration, political, academic, nobility and professional, has their own rules, which can be mixed and combined, but these rules differ in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. It was a quite archaic and exciting problem to solve.

[realityking]

To further your point, here’s the German government’s 173 page guide on how to address people correctly: https://www.protokoll-inland.de/SharedDocs/downloads/Webs/PI...

Besides government officials and foreign signatories, the largest section is indeed about clergy.

Note that this is super formal. In most business you can get by with Dr. and Prof., nothing else.

[FabHK]

My favourites:

"Eure Spektabilität" and "Eure Magnifizenz" for the "Dekan" (dean) and "Rektor" (president/chancellor), respectively, of a university. I wish to meet one, just to use that term.

[realityking]

Hah, I used to be active in student politics and managed to use both of these in writing and heard them plenty of times in speeches.

[pjmlp]

I can imagine how hard it turned out to be, thanks for sharing.