Re: OT: German particles (was Re: OT: German Imperatives)

Hi!

Paul Bennett writes:
>...
> Their meanings are hard to succinctly express in English.
>...
I tried it myself once, but my problem was that there are so many
different usages and that each one was hard to pinpoint.  I neither
knew whether I found a good explanation for a given sentence, and I
neither knew whether I found all possible sentences.  And when looking
at the resulting set of sentences per particle, it was often hard to
find a link, which was actually something I had hoped to find.

Your list is quite good, actually, I think.  But you are also missing
many usages -- which was one of my problems, too.

>...
> Ja (aside from meaning "yes") also prefixes a "reminder" phrase --
> something the speaker believes the listener already knows. I'd say it
> most  closely mirrors "it bears pointing out" or "it bears repeating".
>...
I think this is quite a good explanation.

Dutch does not have this one and despite the fact that Dutch is also
well equipped with many other of these particles, the people I met in
the Netherlands who tried to use 'ja' properly really had a hard time.
'Ja' was often used as an indicator of colloquial German. :-)
Likewise, I had and still have a very hard time using Dutch 'hoor'
correctly, which German lacks and which seems to weaken or emphasise a
sentence depending on, well, I don't really know.

I think this shows how tricky these particles really are.  Therefore,
a nice PhD thesis about them would be great. :-)

>...
> ... which is probably insufficient for non-German speakers, and
> annoyingly  not quite right for German speakers -- see also "'I think
> it would be a  good idea if...'", which was seriously not on my "doch"
> radar.
>...
Probably the usage in imperatives is totally different.

>...
> ObConlang, and AFMCL, I plan on having such a class in Finlaesk, when
> I  get around to it. Also, I've started work on the
> Celtic-koine-substrate-with-a-Latin-superstrate-with-an-ON-superstrate-on-top
> "Hibernian" language from the same AU. Right now, I'm just wrangling
> phonemes, and branding a few of them with graphemes.
Hehe, this sounds interesting!  Looking forward to your posts here.

Ooops... Late... Train...

*Henrik