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

From:Eugene Oh <un.doing@...>
Date:Sunday, November 16, 2008, 15:56
"...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 >