Obligatory Mark Twain on this, in case you or others haven't read his essay on learning German:

"observe how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course, then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state."

https://faculty.georgetown.edu/jod/texts/twain.german.html

Wow, this is such an incredible take-down, thank you for sharing!

German is one of those languages where the spoken and written languages are incredibly distinct. I've felt that the written language requires massive intellect to pull apart as a non-native speaker, in comparison to the spoken language (once you adjust for pronunciation, etc.).

The formalities of proper written German are inscrutable, this does a great job of laying the most painful aspects out.

Honestly, in my experience as a native German speaker spoken and written German are more similar to each other than spoken and written English. Just speak German as you would write it might sound a little bit more formal than is usual, but it won't cause you any trouble to err a little bit on the "too formal" side.

> I've felt that the written language requires massive intellect to pull apart as a non-native speaker, in comparison to the spoken language (once you adjust for pronunciation, etc.).

I rather think that the people who you spoke with used a simpler structure of sentences than is common in educated circles because you would otherwise have difficulties understanding them.

You should actually rather feel spoiled: in older German texts, it can actually easily happen that a whole paragraph consists of one single sentence (this rarely occurs in contemporary texts). Just to give one single arbitrary example:

"Wenn es die Verwirklichung von Urträumen ist, fliegen zu können und mit den Fischen zu reisen, sich unter den Leibern von Bergriesen durchzubohren, mit göttlichen Geschwindigkeiten Botschaften zu senden, das Unsichtbare und Ferne zu sehen und sprechen zu hören, Tote sprechen zu hören, sich in wundertätigen Genesungsschlaf versenken zu lassen, mit lebenden Augen erblicken zu können, wie man zwanzig Jahre nach seinem Tode aussehen wird, in flimmernden Nächten tausend Dinge über und unter dieser Welt zu wissen, die früher niemand gewußt hat, wenn Licht, Wärme, Kraft, Genuß, Bequemlichkeit Urträume der Menschheit sind, – dann ist die heutige Forschung nicht nur Wissenschaft, sondern ein Zauber, eine Zeremonie von höchster Herzens- und Hirnkraft, vor der Gott eine Falte seines Mantels nach der anderen öffnet, eine Religion, deren Dogmatik von der harten, mutigen, beweglichen, messerkühlen und -scharfen Denklehre der Mathematik durchdrungen und getragen wird."

(https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/musil/mannohne/chap011.htm...)

And no, I have no difficulties understanding this sentence.

> And no, I have no difficulties understanding this sentence.

This is what calls my attention most. During your language acquisition process, your brains may develop some specialized connections to handle such sentences. In Portuguese (and probably in most languages) it is possible to build such monstrosities -- and there are concrete examples which I won't recall now. However, one does that for literaly reasons, to sound overly sophisticated or intentionally difficult etc. It's definitely not a natural way to write, and it probably never happens spontaneously on spoken language. I can, very sporadically, grasp such long sentences in my language at the first pass, but it's always difficult and, even then, I usually reread just to make sure I really understood it.

The "trying to sound overly sophisticated" is a thing in German too, no worries :)

That said, personally I'm prone to this when writing. Even in English.

You've also tried. With this sentence, haven't you ;)

    I can, very sporadically, grasp such long sentences in my language at the first pass, but it's always difficult and, even then, I usually reread just to make sure I really understood it. 

With some thinking you can probably convert your entire post into a one sentence paragraph.

> I rather think that the people who you spoke with used a simpler structure of sentences than is common in educated circles because you would otherwise have difficulties understanding them.

I think this is probably true. I mean, it's natural to have a more waxing structure and decorative diction when attempting to express oneself poetically.

I guess it just feels like the ceiling of "acceptably waxing" in German poetic discourse is stratospheric in comparison.

I think the lengthy prepositions on their own would be more tolerable – but when you toss in various obscure inflections on adjectives and nouns, the split verbs, overloaded words like `sie`, it feels like a system that was designed to confound! Or, conversely, to signal intelligence.

It reminds me of the idea that the rules of proper dining etiquette were invented arbitrarily at the court of Louis XIV, mainly as an improvised mechanism for dunking on the aristocrats they didn't like. :)

I imagine it must make for wonderful poetry and literature, though. I'm imagining some young up-and-comer confidently promising "he'll take care of the patrician's daughter while in the palace". But he accidentally uses the wrong "the" for "palace" because it's a word he's not accustomed to using or hearing, forming an ironic double-entendre that he doesn't understand, that makes him look foolish to the patrician and foreshadows some misbehavior to the reader.

On the one hand, it's beautiful that the inflection of one word, can totally invert the meaning of a sentence. But on the other hand you have to be so knowledgeable about the minutiae of the language itself to even catch it when it happens! And in the end, it could have been a typo of the author. Argh :D German.

I'm a native German speaker as well. While I understand this sentence, I think it is bad style in many cases. It's fine for artsy things where the reader is focused but if you have sentences like this in e.g. a report for a project you did or in an email to a colleague at work, it will most likely not be read at all or not understood correctly. What I mean with this: In everyday situations where people are stressed and/or in a hurry they don't take the time to read anything long properly. Also the the longer the sentences become, the harder it is to get the grammar right.

Very often I heard (and applied) the rule for "everyday" communication to keep the sentences short and to split longer ones if possible.

That’s horrendous and seems like bad form in any language. I was taught to write English as I speak it. If you need to pause, use a comma. If you need to breathe, use a period. But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.

> I was taught to write English as I speak it. [...] But don’t run on sentences if you wouldn’t speak it out loud the same way.

This is no contradiction. In particular in formal public speaks in German it is not uncommon to use complicated sentence constructions - and the audience is expected to understand it.

In other words: the difference is rather in the mentality.

- The English mentality rather seems to be to avoid complicated constructions. This might be explainable by the melting pot of the United States, where you could not rely on that everybody is very knowledgeable in English.

- The German-speaking world was historically much more culturally homogeneous. So you could rely on the fact that the conversational partner is pretty confident in the German language; so you could use sophisticated language constructions.

That’s interesting but I would still expect a German to take a breath.

To your point, both the UK and US had melting pot scenarios. The former is where the vast majority of the language was defined.

You may have guessed correctly that I’m American, but I speak nearly identically to my ancestors in 1776. Likely only losing some colloquialisms and picking up others. Perhaps losing Scottish, Dutch, French, German and Swiss accents.

In my family, my g-great grandfather from Munich or Mecklenburg (both apply but I don’t recall which ancestor this was offhand), forbade children from speaking English at the dinner table. He thought they were making fun of him. Sometimes language is less melted and simply dies off.

It's funny to see this actually. I never thought about it the way I read it from Mark Twain. Neither had I ever thought about English being a hard language because it has no regularity and every second word is an exception in how to pronounce it. But French eludes me.

Written German of the times of Mark Twain is also quite different from today's. Of course the actual context dictates formality as well. Personally I can't understand Shakespeare era English nor German. It's just gibberish to me. With lots of concentration maybe but not just reading or listening to it.

Also, the whole Dative and Genetive thing is not just a formality/written vs spoken thing but more a generational and societal one. Using Dative for things where the rules actually prescribe Genetive is a class thing. Working class usually means everything is just Dative. And if you're not good at learning languages. Even as a German native speaker. If you are trying to sound high society and snobbish you'll use a lot of Genetive in the proper way. Or if you simply learned it that way and it became second nature to do it correctly. A lot has changed that way since Twain.

> Written German of the times of Mark Twain is also quite different from today's.

The German language mutated less over the centuries than the English language. An educated native German speaker should be able to mostly understand the "Nibelungenlied" (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibelungenlied), a text written down in the mid 13th century, which is thus nearly 800 years old.

-Ish I guess :)

    Uns ist in alten mæren wunders vil geseit
    von helden lobebæren, von grôzer arebeit,
    von freuden, hôchgezîten, von weinen und von klagen,
    von küener recken strîten muget ír nu wunder hœren sagen

A "mær" (as Maer - imagine an a umlaut) does exist still but the word is so antiquated that I don't expect kids these days to know it. "wunders"? No idea. Something about "wonder"? "vil" sure, viel (a lot). "geseit". No idea. "seit" is that "sein" (to be)? Doesn't fit the rest of the sentence I guess. Definitely need to look that up.

"lobebæren". No damn idea whatsoever. Now "grôzer arebeit", sure that's "grosser Arbeit" but when I look at the "translation to German" (from the middle high German the original apparently is written in) it says it's "groesse Muehsahl".

"hôchgezîten": Hochzeiten? Like weddings? Makes no sense. Maybe "Hochzeiten" as in 'high times'? Funnily same word different pronunciation depending on context :)

"recken" very old word. Again something kids these days probably have no idea about. I do but it's been a while I learned it all. "strîten" means streiten I guess which makes sense given the Recken, but without knowing what those are, not sure. "muget" Sounds like "muggle" but maybe "moeget"? So "moegte ihr". "nu wunder hœren sagen": "jetzt wunder hoeren sagen"? But what does that mean?

Some of this may not be a problem of "Shakespeare's times" vs. today but also "poem language" vs. "regular people language". I have trouble with poems.

I'd write it as this basically:

    Uns ist in alten Maeren viel Wunder <no idea what geseit is>
    von Helden <somethingwhatever>, von grosser Arbeit
    von Freuden, Hochzeiten, von Weinen und von Klagen,
    von kuehner Recken streiten moeget ihr Wunder hoeren sagen

Now even after looking up the two missing words, geseit is gesagt (to say) and lobebaeren just doesn't exist but was somehow translated to something I still would not be able to understand this if it was just read to me. I have to read it myself and actively think about it. On the other hand my sibling posts meandering whole paragraph sentence is very easily understandable.

On the other hand, here's a recipe for strengthening a wooden shield with leather in old English:

    take lether that ys half tannyd and drye hym and shave the flesshe syd
    and take glwu wt water and set yt over the fyere
    and melte yt wt water and then al hote ly yt a pone the leder on the flesshe syde
    and strawe ther on the powder of glasce bete yn a brasene morter ...

I'll stop there so we stay within the same 4 lines. But I had a much easier time reading that than the Niebelungenlied. And yes, my mother tongue is German :)

    take leather that is half tanned and dry him and shave the flesh side
    and take glue with water and set it over the fire
    and melt it with water and then while hot lie it upon the leather on the flesh side
    and strew thereon the powder of glass beaten in a <brasene I had to look up but also makes sense: brass-en> mortar

If anything, except for spelling mistakes like syd vs. syde, I think that's actually more consistent than modern English. I.e. I'd say syd for side is perfect. A y by itself makes the "why" sound. So syd is exactly how I'd write it if I was told to write it just from hearing the word once and knowing the alphabet. Why does it need an e at the end and why would we nowadays write it as side but not pronounce the e (like French sort of, just leave out the last 1-3 letters when pronouncing a word).

> If anything, except for spelling mistakes like syd vs. syde, I think that's actually more consistent than modern English. I.e. I'd say syd for side is perfect. A y by itself makes the "why" sound. So syd is exactly how I'd write it if I was told to write it just from hearing the word once and knowing the alphabet.

Because it used to be pronounced with the e, not unlike Seite, but has long since been dropped. In the 1300s, in the time of Chaucer and The Canterbury Tales, this would've been pronounced with the trailing e.

That is awesome info! Very interesting that English used to be more like German in that regard then, i.e. being able to actually kinda write things like you say them (or vice versa).

Do you know if this is more of an exceptional case or was it common for many words?

I'm no expert on the subject, but I'm to understand things were somewhat cleaner in the past. A critical problem is that, like many languages, English's pronunciation shifted over the years, but the spelling did not. In truth, I think the spelling was somewhat unstable. It was somewhat subjective back then.

But the spelling became exceptionally bad after the printing press with movable type (i.e. Gutenberg's printing press). The printers decided for themselves on certain spellings and the spellings really froze in place based on the choices the printers made. This was also the period of rapid changes in pronunciation, particularly vowels. But English never really had a spelling reform except Webster's small one in early USA. And yet the spelling was locked in place. Whoops!

> A "mær" (as Maer - imagine an a umlaut) does exist still but the word is so antiquated that I don't expect kids these days to know it.

The word [die] Mär/die Märe [the lore, myth] (in modern German one would rather use "die Kunde" (not to be confused with "der Kunde" [the customer])) is used regularly in modern German in the diminutive form: "das Märchen" (the fairly tale). So, a Märchen [fairy tale] is a small lore.

> "wunders"

die Wunder [the wonders].

> "geseit"

In modern German, you would say "gesagt", which is actually rather similar, but it might cause trouble to find this relationship on your own.

> lobebæren

You can immediately see the relationship to the noun "[das] Lob". So you can guess that in modern German you would use "gelobt" (I agree that using "gelobt" sounds a little bit stilted in modern German, but this shall not matter here).

> sure that's "grosser Arbeit" but when I look at the "translation to German" (from the middle high German the original apparently is written in) it says it's "groesse Muehsahl".

Your guess is perfectly correct: the meaning of "Arbeit" has shifted over time, so in modern German, you would rather use the word "Mühsal".

> "hôchgezîten": Hochzeiten? Like weddings?

A wedding is actually a "high time" (Hoch-Zeit). This relationship is slightly obscured in modern German in that if you mean "wedding" the initial "o" in Hochzeit is pronounced differently when meaning "wedding". If you pronounce "Hochzeit" as "Hoch-Zeit", the meaning becomes very clear ("Hochzeit" as in "Hochphase" ["high phase" -> heyday]).

> "recken" very old word.

The word "der Recke" [valiant] is a (slightly old-fashioned) word that does exist in modern German.

> "strîten" means streiten

Exactly; "streiten" in the today less commonly used (but perfectly understandable) meaning "kämpfen" [to combat]. If you are used to the lyrics of the Lohengrin opera

> http://www.wagneroperas.com/indexlohengrinlibretto.html

"streiten"/[der] Streiter is permanently used in this older meaning, for example:

Friedrich: [...] Hier steh' ich, hier mein Schwert! Wer wagt von euch, zu streiten wider meiner Ehre Preis!

Die Brabanter: Keiner von uns! Wir streiten nur für dich!

    used regularly in modern German in the diminutive form: "das Märchen"

Agreed. That word is used and everyone knows it. "Maer" as an actual word. Very much not so. I did not make the connection actually although your explanation makes perfect sense for the origin of Maerchen.

    lobebæren

    You can immediately see the relationship to the noun "[das] Lob"

I did not see that at all and I do not think I'm the only one. Now, once you've told me, I can totally see it. This is exactly my point about not being able to just listen to this or read it and understand right away. I have to stop and think and look stuff up.

    The word "der Recke" [valiant] is a (slightly old-fashioned) word that does exist in modern German.

I never said the word does not exist. Just that, like you also mention, it's old (fashioned) and not in very active use and I do not expect many kids these days to recognize the word. If you read slightly older books about knights and such for boys with a bunch of "kuehne Recken", sure. Otherwise: doubtful in my opinion.

    If you are used to the lyrics of the Lohengrin opera

That's also part of my point. If you're into poems, especially old ones, you'll have a better time. If you're "poem blind" like me, there's no way I can just have someone read the Niebelungenlied in the original to me and understand what's going on. No I am not used to Lohengrin type lyrics.

As for using Streit as a noun, yes, no problem there, though the fact that there's no proper capitalization in the Niebelungenlied text does not help to figure that out. I immediately read it as "streiten" the verb only.

Q: Why does past participle in German begin with "ge-"?

A: To give the speaker some time to remember what verb they had in mind 90 seconds ago when they started the sentence.

Why would the "normal" way of thinking/saying things, involve putting the verb, then the object, and not the other way around ? Pretty much like arguing that the normal way of writing is from left to right. Good demonstration of how brains are wired differently.

Haha thanks for bringing this quote.

That reminds me of a german friend listening to an announcement in a train station. He raised his hand signing he couldn't be disturbed and seemed to hold his breath during that fairly long speech. And at the end he told me "this language is so messed up, I had to listen it all up to the end to figure out whether we should wait some more minutes or leave and take a bus".

Like "Ladies and Gentlemen. Train XYZ 123 from Hamburg Hauptbahnhof to Hamburg Harburg, originally arriving on track 12. This train is going to be late by 3 hours. Please take bus 112 instead"? And yes this is how they would say it, just literally translated to English.

Seriously, which part here is language related vs. just structuring your announcements in a way where all information you need is presented in the way it makes sense? If you don't announce which train this is about first, then lots of people will have to listen to lots of announcements even though they're not meant for them. If you know your train number you can stop listening at "123". If you just know your destination and the trains origin/where you are you can stop listening right there etc.

My take on this kind of announcement structure, independent of language: the specifics (e.g. train/flight number) should be repeated at the beginning and end of the message. Why? Because people listen differently, also depending on the context and how many low-importance messages are being broadcast into the environment. When I'm at a station/airport and there is an announcement every two minutes of something mundane, e.g. which platform or gate is the next departure, I filter them all out, because I've already looked up that information on the screens or on my phone. Only when I subconsciously register something like 'cancelled' or 'changed platforms' or 'severe delay' do I start listening to hear if it is pertinent to me or not. That's when it's useful for the announcer to reiterate which service they are talking about, for those who only started paying attention half way through the message.

Unfortunately I didn't bother to ask my friend for the specifics. But the need to hear attentively and wait for the end of the sentence had something to do with the verb describing what happened to the train. It could be either a minor, temporary problem quickly fixable, or a more severe incident which would require more time to work out. The difference would be determined by the verb prefix at the end and, by its turn, would determine our course of action.

It's unfortunately very necessary to know the exact sentence to be able to understand what your friend was experiencing there. I very much doubt that it's an unfixably ingrained part of the German language based on sentence structure and rather a specific message he heard.

Unlike the numbers below 100, e.g. 24 = "Vierundzwanzig" and not "Zwanzigvier" like in English.

Complete Japanese, SOV language, tangent: It's interesting watching real time thinking as the speaker navigates the final conjugation they intend to finish the sentence with. In a way I've always seen this as two things, 1) it gives the speaker time to think (along with their common filler words), and b) an option to change not only the tense of their sentence let alone compound it with more words, but the level of formality they wish to use on the fly that can also be tuned as they reach the end.

German is not a pure SVO language rather it is classified as V2 (verb second language) in main clauses and SOV in subordinate clauses. At least I prefer to look at it in that - admittedly unsatisfactory - descriptive manner.[0][1]

There are some folks (like in Generative Grammar) arguing that it has an underlying SOV layer which makes kind of sense because it gets processed like half of the time essentially like pure SOV languages. But alas sometimes one size doesn't fit all. In English you have to go through the extraordinary effort of a wedding ceremony in order to utter the words in SOV order: "With this ring I thee wed." That is some pure SVO energy right here, only broken by love ;)

[0]https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/1057/german-...

[1]https://jakubmarian.com/is-german-an-svo-language/

You are saying. For me as a native German speaker I feel very much the same when trying to speak Portuguese.

I'm used to simply read a verb and start picturing the sentence meaning in my mind, immediately. Whereas in Portuguese there's this need to keep the whole conjugation table in working memory so you can figure out the meaning.

Also in Portuguese verb forms are really important to understand and communicate meaning whereas split verbs are just fancy dressing even Germans get wrong sometimes.

Conjugations are just compound words with improved efficiency. If anything, maybe they're too German.

Hardly, with almost 70 forms per verb, many irregular verbs and almost 20 different tenses/modes in Portuguese - German is really a kid's game.

Literally, though it's hardly obvious. Language Transfer does a good job of presenting Romance languages as conceptually regular in a way that's helpful, at least for beginners.

I forget the term, but there's a concept where a word's distinct parts become merged in the mind of a native speaker. A simplistic example would be "breakfast". I was surprised as a kid to learn that it means "break fast" because I thought of it as an indivisible thing. Maybe that's obvious to Germans.

Verb conjugations can be similarly decomposed, as long as you learn the conceptual "regular" form and the pronunciation "value system" that creates all the variety and irregular forms. It doesn't work for everything, but I think it's useful. It's more of a stretch for Portuguese, but the etymology is still there.

The thing is, when you become accustomed to the language there is no such thing as keeping stuff in the working memory. I think that’s just a convoluted way of explaining the processes that are behind speaking/understanding a language. As a native speaker of German I pretty much know at the first few words of the sentence which verb/words will have to follow and how the sentence will have to end. The meaning or information is not necessarily encoded in the verb or in those words that are moved to the end of the sentence. It’s just the shell of the sentence that is so common and you‘ll see/hear so often, you don‘t think about it anymore. Ultimately it‘s just pattern recognition that doesn’t require a lot of effort, IF you know the sentence structures that go with it.

That’s also why I guess learning a language with a lot of input goes a long way to absorb the structure of a language, because at some point you‘ve seen everything and only the important bits (the real information) remain if you look at a sentence.

Yesterday I was reading some Frege[1] text, "Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung", or more accurately a French translation by Claude Imbert.

In this essay, he makes some interesting remarks on how propositions uttered are only the tip of the iceberg of the meaning intended.

What you say is of course true, in the same extent that you already have an idea about what someone is most likely going to say even before they open their mouth. It doesn’t invalidate that in German you might put a twist in the very end of your sentence, something that will be harder in a language structured differently, to the point that most attempt to do so will feel convoluted enough that you will probably spot it far before the end of the sentence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottlob_Frege

Language usually has some sort of forward error correction so that if you mishear parts of a sentence, you can still reconstruct the content from the surrounding words.

As a native German speaker, I have a very similar problem with Japanese. In Japanese it is possible (and popular, I'd say) to describe an object before mentioning what you are describing. For example, I can go on a tangent and have elaborate descriptions of an object ("is painted white, has two floors, a nice garden, a bus stop is close by, ...") but only at the very end of this description I tell the audience what object I'm describing ("a house"). It feels like my brain has to buffer all the adjectives and verbs before I finally know what I can apply them to. Very challenging for me.

Well, I guess the better you get, the earlier you can deduct what this is about and I also guess that my analogy of "buffering" is not how it actually works but it feels like it.

Having things like verbs, and negation at the end also allows to say the total opposite of what the listener might be expecting from the beginning of the sentence.