Wednesday, August 31, 2016

That's not helpful


It reminds me of Mark Twain's essay, "The Awful German Language".  He read a book in German but didn't understand what happened in the story.  You see, all the verbs went to the last page and someone had torn out that page.

5 comments:

  1. Only a German is so uncourteous to his verbs...

    ReplyDelete
  2. My lifelong friend Jim is a funny guy.
    When we'd walk the mile to high school together, along a busy
    thoroughfare, he'd note a semitrailer truck getting ready to speed by us in the opposite direction, often messing up our hair in it's draught.
    And it was VERY loud.
    And, as it passed, he'd remark, as the sounds returned to normal,
    "And THAT's how you save the World!"

    gfa

    ReplyDelete
  3. I had heard his story about how a German begins a sentence like someone swimming from America to France, and the German comes out of the sentence like the swimmer with a fish in his mouth.

    It is no wonder that Germans capitalize nouns but not verbs, and many words are snapped together like they are Legos.

    As a college professor wrote once on a paper, "This like German sounds",
    so the saying I use is, "German the verb til the end of the sentence saves."

    ReplyDelete

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