{"id":40923,"date":"2004-01-24T07:01:00","date_gmt":"2004-01-24T07:01:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2004\/01\/24\/in-defense-of-the-german-language\/"},"modified":"2021-02-13T08:10:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-13T16:10:02","slug":"20040124-00","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040124-00\/?p=40923","title":{"rendered":"In defense of the German language"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20040123-00\/?p=40933\"> Some commenters deplored the inflectional complexity of the German language<\/a>. I find the complexity reassuring rather than offputting, because it means that you always know where to find the functional parts of the sentence.<\/p>\n<p>The lack of inflectional complexity in English is made up for by its much more complicated structural form. English word order is nuts.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I rarely go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I don&#8217;t go often.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I don&#8217;t usually go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Why does the temporal adverb go in front of the verb in one case, but after it in another? And it comes in the middle of the verb in a third case!<\/p>\n<p>(Okay, technically you can put the adverb in any of those places, but it sounds stilted or changes the meaning of the sentence subtly. Try explaining that to a student of English and they will merely shake their head in frustration.)<\/p>\n<p>Or consider the placement of the verb particle in English (which corresponds to the German separable prefix):<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I picked it up.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I picked up the ball.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I picked the ball up.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>but not &#8220;I picked up it.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Now put these two rules together and you find that seemingly minor changes to a sentence (changing one temporal adverb for another, replacing a noun with a pronoun) has a radical effect upon sentence structure.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;I rarely pick up the ball.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;I don&#8217;t pick it up often.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The sentence structure goes from<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&lt;subject&gt; &lt;frequency&gt; &lt;verb&gt; &lt;particle&gt; &lt;object&gt;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>to<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&lt;subject&gt; &lt;verb&gt; &lt;object&gt; &lt;particle&gt; &lt;frequency&gt;.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>How is anybody expected to learn this?<\/p>\n<p>In German, the word order is predictable. All of these sentences would be structured as &#8220;&lt;subject&gt; &lt;verb&gt; &lt;object&gt; &lt;frequency&gt; &lt;prefix&gt;&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>For added fun, add &#8220;carefully&#8221; to the sentence and watch everything moves around again: &#8220;I don&#8217;t often pick it up carefully.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>I find it ironic that when a Germanic language discards inflectional complexity (making it harder to see the relationship among the words in a sentence), it compounds the difficulty by adding greater structural complexity (making it even harder still to see the relationship among the words in a sentence).<\/p>\n<p>Twain complained about all the exceptions. Actually I find that German is comparatively lacking in exceptions; the rules tend to be followed fairly uniformly. Twain complains about &#8220;parentheticals&#8221;, but it is the parentheticals that make English so crazy. In German, the rule is very simple: &#8220;The adjective comes before the noun&#8221;. Even if the adjective happens to be complicated. &#8220;The to-its-winter-home-flying goose.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Whereas in English, the rule is &#8220;The adjective comes before the noun, unless the adjective would sound better if it came after the noun.&#8221; &#8220;The goose flying to its winter home&#8221; but &#8220;The slowly-flying goose&#8221;. Try explaining that to your dad.<\/p>\n<p>English, now that&#8217;s where all the crazy exceptions hang out.<\/p>\n<p>For example, the adverb can be moved to the front for emphasis<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Sometimes I go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>&#8220;Usually I don&#8217;t go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>but not: &#8220;Rarely I don&#8217;t go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<li>but not: &#8220;Always I don&#8217;t go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&#8220;Rarely&#8221; is one of those exceptions that require inverted word order.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>&#8220;Rarely do I go.&#8221;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And &#8220;always&#8221; is an even weirder exception: You can&#8217;t start a declarative sentence with it at all! (Though you can start imperatives with it. Go figure.)<\/p>\n<p>Swedish used to be a more heavily inflected language, but it has been shedding its inflectional complexity over the centuries. (The number of genders reduced from three to two; special inflective forms for plurals have been removed; the dative case is now obsolete&#8230;) To compensate, Swedish (like English) has been making the verb forms and word order more complicated. The word &#8220;inte&#8221; (&#8220;not&#8221;) goes immediately after the finite verb, except when it doesn&#8217;t. And sometimes it changes to &#8220;ej&#8221; or &#8220;ikke&#8221; for reasons I have yet to determine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>What we lose in inflectional complexity we gain in word order uniformity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[103],"class_list":["post-40923","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-non-computer"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>What we lose in inflectional complexity we gain in word order uniformity.<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40923","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=40923"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40923\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=40923"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=40923"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=40923"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}