Re: Verb order in Montreiano

Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>Will look.  And hey...I could try to brush up my German, even though I
>suspect a year of it really isn't adequate for reading anything technical
>or difficult.  OTOH, who knows...my advisor keeps recommending _Lehrbuch
>der Topologie_ to me, and most of the vocab I can identify pretty quickly
>as math terminology, it's the grammar that'd get me.  Either that or the
>first chapter, which he says is the hardest because it tries to give you
>an intuitive feel for the subject in layman's terms.>

Give it a try-- I bet you'll surprise yourself.  Prior to grad school, my
German consisted of the memorized lyrics from a recording of Brecht/Weill
songs as sung by Lotte Lenya.  Very clear diction, though dialectal ([IS]
for _ich_, e.g).  Then I had to tackle a lot of anthro/ling stuff in German,
in particular the gospel of Austronesian linguistics, Dempwolff's
Vergleichende Lautlehre.  It turned out to be highly formulaic and
repetitive (lots of Malay examples helped), and while I wore out the
dictionary, I did get the information right. The grammar tends to sort
itself out.  (I should mention that I flunked my first German proficiency
exam-- the rat who admistered it used a passage on Child Development, a
page-long text consisting of maybe 3 sentences.  Dempwolff's style by
comparison was almost simple-minded.)

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