Re: LIFO languages (was Re: "Theory informs practice" - OK?)

"...fließt, führt, steht..."?!
My goodness. That reminds me of this Japanese sentence with a quadruple
negation on the same semantic unit.

"... _fu_sansei dewa _nai_ to wa ie_naku_ mo _nai_"
It is _not_ that you _can't_ say that I am _not_ in _dis_approval about
this...

That was said by a politician in response to a question about his support
for a particular foreign policy event (can't remember what it was, but the
quotation can be found in Kindaichi Haruhiko's "The Japanese Language").

Cue: politician jokes.

Eugene


On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 2:32 PM, Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...>wrote:

> Hallo!
>
> On Sat, 15 Nov 2008 21:57:46 +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
>
> > Quoting Lars Finsen <lars.finsen@...>:
> > > Den 15. nov. 2008 kl. 17.53 skreiv Jörg Rhiemeier:
> > [...]
> > > > The Fith grammar allows for really bizarre manipulations of word
> > > > order which are indeed at least very hard to follow for humans.
> > >
> > > Well, so does German, for example. German legal or technical text can
> > > be really hard to figure out sometimes. Sentences often end with two
> > > verbs belonging to different clauses, and I think I have seen three.
> >
> > Does anyone ever use those registers of German in real-time conversation,
> > however?
>
> Not much at least. Complicated nested sentences are a matter of
> written language almost exclusively, and spoken German avoids
> such hairy constructions. Nobody ever *speaks* sentences like:
>
> Wer denjenigen, der den Wegweiser, der an der Brücke, die über
> den Bach, der von Ahausen nach Bettelheim fließt, führt, steht,
> umgeworfen hat, anzeigt, erhält 500 Mark Belohnung.
>
> That's grammatically correct German, but almost impossible
> to follow.
>
> ... brought to you by the Weeping Elf
>