Re: Liking German

David Peterson wrote:
>
>     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.
I had a reply-to address in the Netscape settings; that might have been
the cause.  On the other hand, you might have just clicked the "Reply"
button, which sometimes causes just splits.  The "Reply All" button
should always include the list address.


>     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.)
Your extra morphology doesn't rearrange the sentence; rather, it
replaces it with another sentence.

The main clause in those sentences are "It was a dog", "It was in the
cinema", and the rest of the information is packed into a relative
clause.  Again, the word order in the two clauses are fixed and
unambiguous.  Saying "A dog it was that in the cinema I saw" would be
ungrammatical outside of lyrical language, or Star Wars.

The rearrangements of the German sentence on the other hand preserved
everything about it except for the emphasis and rhythm.


> <<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.
True, that sentence is more or less equivalent with the first one, both
sound very unmarked.  Both can also be marked if you place tonal stress
on the first sentence element.

*Ich* gab dem Hund gestern einen Knochen, also bist *du* heute dran.
*Gestern* gab ich dem Hund einen Knochen, aber *heute* hat er noch
nichts bekommen.


> <<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.
Es war ein Knochen, den ich dem Hund gestern gab.
Es war der Hund, dem ich gestern einen Knochen gab.


>     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.
No, you proved that (contemporary) English can emphasize a part of a
sentence by making a private little copula statement out of it, and
placing all the rest into a relative sentence.

Anyway, Shakespeare's English wasn't under that yoke yet, which makes it
so enjoyable and difficult to read.  ;-)


-- Christian Thalmann