Re: Fundamental difference between English and German
- From: MM <kylix_is@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 13 Nov 2008 12:31:00 +0000
On Wed, 12 Nov 2008 10:33:57 -0600, "Amused"
<jamescopeland@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"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...
Petrol is gasoline and Diesel is Diesel. I worked for many years as a
technical translator. Once one knows the foreign language one begins
after a time to think in it. It becomes more comfortable to express
oneself in the foreign language than in one's native tongue while one
is totally immersed in the foreign society. Translating is then not
that hard, really, provided the direction is from one's native
language into the foreign language. It was more difficult for me to
translate into English, because I didn't have the experience of
working or living in a similar environment back in England. It took me
several years after my return to the UK to become reasonably fluent in
English. Today my German is very rusty as I do not have daily occasion
to speak or write it. On return to Germany, however, a week is usually
enough to wake up the brain cells. One never forgets. It's like riding
a bike. One just gets out of practice, that's all.
MM
.
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