Re: OT: German Imperatives

On 5/16/07, Henrik Theiling <theiling@...> wrote:
> David J. Peterson writes:
> > German speakers: is there anything wrong with the following:
> >
> > Kommen Sie hier bitte.
> >
> > It was suggested to me that this was, in some way, uncolloquial.
> >...
>
> I'd say the above sentence is, well, basically wrong.  The normal way
> to say what is probably intended is:
>
>    Kommen Sie bitte her!   (note 'her', not 'hier', that's what
>                            was basically wrong)
FWIW, "her" is roughly "hither" (i.e. direction, "to here"), while
"hier" is roughly "here" (i.e. position, "at here").

Though it's also possible to use both and say "Kommen Sie bitte
hierher", which is a bit more emphatic: "Please come *here* (and don't
go wandering off over there)".

Maybe my mind is in the gutter, but I'd interpret "Kommen Sie bitte
hier" as a request to achieve orgasm (which seems to be the default
interpretation of non-motional "kommen" for me). It's what comes to my
mind in other direction-vs-position situations as well, e.g. "Er ist
in der Schule gekommen" when "Er ist in die Schule gekommen" was meant
-- in+dative indicating location, while in+accusative indicates motion
in a direction. Compare English "He came at school" and "He came to
school", both of which might be produced by a speaker of French or
Spanish while trying to translate a sentence with "à/a".

> It is equally ok to say:
>
>    Bitte kommen Sie her!
>
> And, quite colloquially, you could put 'bitte' last:
>
>    Kommen Sie her, bitte!
Interestingly, I would use commas the way Henrik did -- interestingly
because, for symmetry, it could have been "Bitte, kommen Sie her" and
"Kommen Sie, bitte, her", which I believe are also acceptable but not
as common. I'm not sure why the comma is usually used in "Kommen Sie
her, bitte", but it looks distinctly wrong -- probably because there's
a noticable pause associated with "bitte" in that word order that
isn't there in (my pronunciatio nof) the other two sentences.

> Further, you could use 'small particles' ('ja', 'doch', 'denn', 'mal',
> ... I don't know the correct term,
I've heard the term "Abtönpartikel" used for them in English.

> Different story, but these 'small particles' are hard to translate --
> sometimes you just don't translate them, and sometimes you use a
> totally different structure in English.
Indeed.

> Unfortunately, I've never
> seen a paper on them.  It would be interesting.
I did, once, but I don't remember exactly where. It was a section in a
book that was a collection of papers.

Hang on, though. I think one of the authors (Emer O'Sullivan) was a
co-author of a series of books for young adults that were written half
in English and half in German. Lemme see...

Hmm, can't find what I found that time, but there is, apparently, a
whole book on particles (not just in German, it seems; a random page I
saw on Amazon talked about what looked like Arabic): "Sprechen mit
Partikeln", ISBN 3110115328 / 978-3110115321.

And apparently "Abtönungspartikel" is also used, so "Abtönpartikel"
might be misremembered. The Wikipedia article calls them "German modal
particle" (and "modal particle" for the general phenomenon).

Cheers,
--
Philip Newton <philip.newton@...>