John le Carré: Why we should learn German (2017)

Re:John le Carré: Why we should learn German (2017) by woodandsteel on Sunday February 02, 2020 @06:19PM (#22220156)

I took a year of German in graduate school so I could read German philosophical texts. On thing that really struck me about the language is that the main verb in a sentence goes at the end. So a German sentence translated word-for-word into English would be something like "I to the store in my car went."

Also I remember learning that German philosophy students prefer to read the English translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason because it broke up the impossibly long sentences of the original.

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Re:John le Carré: Why we should learn German (2017) by SkyMarshal on Tuesday February 04, 2020 @06:49PM (#22242451)

German is Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order. English and others are SVO. I always liked SOV languages since first learning one because they feel like using a Reverse Polish Notation (RPN [1]) calculator like the HP-15c (just mentioned here recently [2]). The verb, like the operator in the calculator, comes last, and operates all on the inputs before it.

[1]:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Polish_notation

[2]:https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22222897

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