Re: Fundamental difference between English and German

"MM" <kylix_is@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:9cplh4laqo2a8hqunsvcjmt9nf6rpg819f@xxxxxxxxxx
While editing my memoirs I recalled the early days of learning German
and how funny it was to find the verb at the end of the sentence.

Perhaps it is this simple difference that accounts for the huge
differences in national character between Germans and the English,
though I haven't worked out how or why yet.

But take the simple sentence:

I must eat...vegetables.

And in German:

Ich muss Gemüse... essen.

So while we put more importance on the verb, the Germans place it on
the noun. To a German brain, therefore, the noun, or object, precedes
the verb and must surely be more important. Thus German could be said
to be object-oriented.

We could say "I must eat...." and nobody knows what it is, though they
know that we see the need to eat "something" (assuming the sentence
hasn't finished yet).

But the Germans say "Ich muss Gemüse..." and nobody knows yet,
exactly, what the person intends to do with those vegetables. But it's
the vegetables that are initially significant, not what will happen to
them.

I have a suspicion that our intrinsically lackadaisical approach in
our outlook (have you ever seen a country lane that took the
straightest path?) way back in the dim and distant past, way before
Chaucer, decided it was too much effort to wait until the end of the
sentence, and so over centuries we changed the word order to suit and
the result was, eventually, modern English and THE English.

MM


I am working, somewhat lackadaisically, with a German software company, more or less "correcting" their English language WEB pages. I do not speak German, although I live in one of those uniquely American enclaves with very high concentrations of homogeneous populations, and in my case, finding a German-speaking American is not hard. In 1926, my "city", most people would call it a village, actually had to pass a law banning German for all business transactions.)

I say "correcting", but mostly it consists of re-arranging word order, with occasional substitutions of specific words or phrases.* Until I started this project, I wouldn't have thought that word order was all that important. But, (at least in English), it is important. I'd postulate that there are long developed brain pathways on how things should be, and deviation from those pathways or norms, quickly leads to confusion and frustration.

*As an example, "This is handled by a tool which was developed especially." becomes "We have proprietary software that handles this."

Idiomatic words or phrases, are sometimes, almost impossible to explain.

For instance, Americans use the word "boilerplate" to describe phrases or paragraphs that are used over and over again, especially in legal documents. I have no idea if it means the same thing in Great Britain. [One explanation is that in 19th Century America, big newspapers would send pre-set type plates to their subsidiaries in the hinterlands. These, large, curved plates, reminded the typesetters of the standardized iron plates used to make steam boilers, hence, "boilerplate"] But, telling a German-speaker to "Insert boilerplate language here," can lead to many emails, back an forth. <Grin>

The company has decided, rather pragmatically, that America offers a much larger market than Great Britain, and so when British/American English conflicts do arise, I go with American English. Also, since translating into proper British norms is beyond my capabilities, it's American English all the way. When I first began reading this NG, many years ago, I spent a fair amount of time, trying to figure out what-the-devil some posters were trying to say.

Some differences are relatively minor. "Petrol" translates more or less to "gasoline" (shorten to "gas"), but I don't know if "petrol" also encompasses diesel fuel or not. Americans would make a distinction, since diesel fuel is not nearly as available at fuel service stations as gasoline.

But politically speaking, British Prime Ministers are not the political equilivant of American Presidents. Within their own political confines, a Prime Minister is MUCH more powerful than a President, even though an American President is a much more powerful and independent in the institutional sense.

I'm amazed at people that can translate, on the fly, from one language to another.

James...


.

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