Re: Liking German

    Yes, this was sent to you only because you have the wrong settings.  It
was dicussed not to long ago how to change them; I myself don't know.

In a message dated 9/30/01 12:55:03 PM, cinga@gmx.net writes:

<< Also, all

of the above rules can be broken in lyrical language. >>

    As they can in English.

<<> "Ich sehe ins Kino den Hund."  (My German is very basic.)  as opposed to
the

> normal
> "Ich sehe den Hund ins Kino."?

"I see the dog into the cinema?">>

    Yeah, I have only a year of high school German.  What I meant was "I see
a dog IN the cinema" not "into".  Should that have been "im"?
    But you don't even need literary language to change the order of English;
just some extra morphology:

    I saw a dog in the cinema.
    It was in the cinema I saw a dog.
    It was a dog I saw in the cinema.
    In the cinema it was a dog I saw.  (There'd h ave to be a strange
situation to make this plausible.)

<<Ich gab dem Hund gestern einen Knochen.>>

    I was unaware that this was the normal word order...  I would have e
xpected "gestern" to come first, as you listed in your number four example of
emphasized sentences.

<<Einen Knochen gab ich gestern dem Hund.

Dem Hund gab ich gestern einen Knochen.>>

    See, these two would be acceptable in English with some added
morphology...

It was a bone I gave to the dog yesterday.  (or yesterday to the dog)
It was to the dog I gave a bone yesterday.

    So, wait...  Was I wrong or right or neither?  If I was proving that
English word order is just as free, then yes, I think.  If I was trying to
prove that German word order is less so, probably not, huh?

-David

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