yarvelling wrote:Yes Anita, maybe it's the convergence with the Latin languages that caused some of the problems....
However our use of verbs and nouns etc is still 'backward' to how other European countries structure their sentences.....
The example I was using back in my earlier post about comparing the phrase to go shopping... I explained the German structure as I remember and understand it - PLEASE anyone correct me if I got it wrong!!
What I was saying was that in English we might a question "Are we going shopping?", but once the translation into German is done, it comes out more like "Going we shopping?" - which obviously doesn't work in as far as the English language is concerned...... so quite how we in the UK derived our form of language from other parts of Europe and turned it make what we use today, I do not know!! Perhaps it was something so simple among scholars of day just thinking "Going we shopping?" sounds 'bad'... let's add another word or two, and reverse the order a bit, and then give it some stupid technical past injunctive ablative terminology....
Lol!!
I don't 'get' it.... have no idea of the technical terms, but I know what seems to just *flow* correctly for me, but for any poor foreigner trying to learn the language, it must be a nightmare.... the way you think is turned around!!
German is my native language and even though I live now for more than 12 1/2 years in the US, I still think that in most situations you use more words in English for the same sentence than you do in German.
It took me a while to get used to build longer sentences to express the same that I used to express with less words in German.
Example: "Wie geht's?" in German, but "How was your day?" in English.
"Last night" is used for anything that happened yesterday whereas for me that meant for the first few years in the US still "gestern abend" (yesterday in the evening), not afternoon which it also includes in the US.
In German you ask "Willst Du ein Bier?", in English you have to ask "Would you like to have a bottle of beer?".
I still think English is the more polite language with all those "Would you..." and "What do you think, should we do this or that...", but German is shorter. You talk less in German with the same result
.