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Re:Learn to read Middle English by weinzierl on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @03:11AM (#23474729)
> That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence.

There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb".

Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.

Re:Learn to read Middle English by hwj on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @09:22AM (#23476688)
Here's another one:

> Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.

Re:Learn to read Middle English by weinzierl on Wednesday June 10, 2020 @03:38PM (#23481137)
This actually is a Mark Twain quote. When I heard the story about the professor and the students it was attributed to Mark Twain too, but when I tried to look it up before posting I couldn't find a clue.