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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.
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!"
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."
5 comments:
Okay, that's just cruel. :)
Only a German is so uncourteous to his verbs...
DAS AUSBRUCH!!!!!!!!!
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
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."
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