> Don't make your readers hold parts of the sentence in their head.
Funny to read this as I'm learning German! In German the main verb of a sentence has to be at the end depending on the context (e.g: if it is a question, or following some prepositions such as "dass").
Let's say we want to build a question, it will be constructed this way:
1. question marker (such as "Was", "Wo", "Warum", etc)
2. subject
3. other details regarding the subject (adjectives and others)
4. the verb, with correct grammatical form depending on the subject
Something I find quite frustrating is that I have to keep in mind everything about the subject during the entire duration of the sentence just to be able to use the verb correctly. So because of this I always try to keep the distance between a subject and the verb as short as possible when trying to speak German, which results in very terse sentences that looks similar to what you described.
My life partner speaks native German and doesn't even realize that she does this buffering.
A famously playful version of this is the first sentence of Kafka's Metamophorphosis. The reader has the concept of Gregor Samsa waking in his bed from uneasy dreams and then a monstrous vermin in their heads, and the verb they're definitely not expecting to link this subject and object is 'transformed into'...
It's a pain for the translator to pull off the same effect in most other languages.
An American woman visiting Berlin - intent on hearing Bismarck speak - obtained two tickets for the Reichstag visitors' gallery and enlisted an interpreter to accompany her.
Soon after their arrival, Bismarck rose and began to speak. The interpreter, however, simply sat listening with intense concentration. The woman, anxious for him to begin translating, nudged and budged him, to no avail.
Finally, unable to control herself any longer, the woman burst out: "What is he saying!?" "Patience, madam," the interpreter replied. "I am waiting for the verb."
I had a Brazilian roommate who could second this. He (jokingly) complained this was the absolute worst when dealing with split-proposition-verbs:
E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.
However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".
Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).
So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.
Well, English too has some interesting ideas where to put prepositions in the sentence, that is, turn them basically into postpositions. For example, "Which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine in?"
The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".
"In which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?" is perfectly good English. It sounds better to me that the "which ... in" version. (British English speaker.)
Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"
Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.
Shorten even further to "Exquisite marble figure; which basket?" or "which basket? Exquisite marble figure." Depending on which is more likely to short circuit based on context.
I have in mind an idea for a movie scenario where someone important is on their death bed and says their last words, and nobody can tell what they actually meant because it may be missing the second part of the verb, resulting in a potentially completely different meaning :)
>An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech--not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam--that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it--AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way of ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels in "HABEN SIND GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN," or words to that effect, and the monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the nature of the flourish to a man's signature--not necessary, but pretty. German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before the looking-glass or stand on your head--so as to reverse the construction--but I think that to learn to read and understand a German newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a foreigner.
I knew a German to Polish translator and she complained about how hard live translation was when a key part of the sentence is held until the very end.
As someone who is also learning German (Viel Glück!), doesn't the verb always go into the second position unless:
1. It's an infinitive verb, perfect verb, or a verb in a subclause, in which case it goes to the end.
2. You're asking a question without a question word (i.e. "Can you" or "Will you") or issuing a command, in which case the verb moves to the beginning).
Examples:
Verb in second position:
> "Was willst du" -> What do you want?
Infinitive verb at the end of the clause:
> "Ich will mit dir reden" -> I want to talk to you
Conjugated verb at the end of a subclause:
> "Kannst du mir versprechen, dass du mich nie verlassen -wirst?" -> Can you promise you will never leave me
Just to clarify, I'm not any sort of authority on this. Merely trying to double check my own understanding as I continue on my language learning journey :)
Pretty much! However, as such it's really only second in simple present and preterite statements, which are actually sort of rare outside of really simple sentences.
In light of that, the default German construction is effectively verb-last. (separable prefixes moving to the end exacerbates this need for buffering too)
Good point! The separable verb things is super strange for me as a native English speaker. I haven't internalized the meaning for any separable verbs so whenever I see them in text, I usually end up having to re-read or re-listen to the text with the knowledge in mind to actually get the meaning.
I learned Dutch, which does the same thing with the verb, and at one point after a few years it just clicked and started feeling natural to structure sentences that way. I've been living abroad long enough that occasionally I catch myself trying to organize English sentences in that way as I'm speaking (which, of course, results in falling flat on my face at the end.)
In Dutch at least, you can imagine these really long sentences which build up details, adding more and more, until they finally surprise you with the verb at the end. But in practice people don't speak that way - the patterns of speech and just the way people use the language in different subtle ways mostly prevents that from happening, in natural ways that don't feel terse. It may be different in academia/legal professions and that sort of thing.
Actually, in Dutch there is quite some flexibility in verb ordering. Teachers actively warn against so-called pliers-constructions where a subordinate clause is wedged between subject and verb.
Example time!
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw die bloemen plukt kust."
Literally: "The man who (the woman (who flowers picks)) kisses"
Meaning: "The man who kisses the woman that is picking flowers"
The subordinate clause is sandwiched between subject and verb. However, Dutch allows the following order:
Dutch: "De man die de vrouw kust die bloemen plukt."
Literally: "The man who (the woman) kisses (who flowers picks)"
In this case the verb kisses has moved to the front. It is a transformation that allows a form of tail recursion elimination. After the main verb the parse stack for the main clause can be popped and all resources dedicated to parsing the trailing subordinate clause(s). This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
> This allows us to string together quite a lot of subclauses without getting lost.
Correct, a sentence like this is quite easy to read:
De man, die gewoonlijk zijn handen afveegt aan zijn broek, besloot dit keer zijn handen af te vegen aan de handdoek die zijn vrouw, die gister nog bloemen aan het plukken was, specifiek hiervoor had neergelegd.
Oh my, yes. Although I disagree, as it's not such a hard thing when you break it down, I'm usually considered a language genius. I am fluent in more than a handful of languages and my travel activity of choice is learning the local language as fast as I can, which starts yielding real results around the 2 week mark. But despite living in Germany for 16 years and having studied it in a bilingual middle school for a handful more, I don't dare near a German newspaper.
Japanese has proven similarly hard, but for completely different reasons.
Reminds me of this excellent sentence of Hofstadter's, on the concept of treating language as a stack composed of clauses and popped by verbs:
"The proverbial German phenomenon of the 'verb-at-the-end', about which droll tales of absentminded professors who would begin a sentence, ramble on for an entire lecture, and then finish up by rattling off a string of verbs by which their audience, for whom the stack had long since lost its coherence, would be totally nunplussed, are told, is an excellent example of linguistic pushing and popping."
I’m from Austria, so I speak german, but I don’t think we buffer. We guess through out the sentence what the next part might be and slowly move that assumption to the final meaning of the sentence. That’s why I have to reread a sentence, when I was wrong. Same principle as in jokes.
Funny to read this as I'm learning German! In German the main verb of a sentence has to be at the end depending on the context (e.g: if it is a question, or following some prepositions such as "dass").
Let's say we want to build a question, it will be constructed this way:
1. question marker (such as "Was", "Wo", "Warum", etc)
2. subject
3. other details regarding the subject (adjectives and others)
4. the verb, with correct grammatical form depending on the subject
Something I find quite frustrating is that I have to keep in mind everything about the subject during the entire duration of the sentence just to be able to use the verb correctly. So because of this I always try to keep the distance between a subject and the verb as short as possible when trying to speak German, which results in very terse sentences that looks similar to what you described.
My life partner speaks native German and doesn't even realize that she does this buffering.