German word order -verb last--2 theological comments, 1 business comment

[bobbieinok]

Theological

1) German is the perfect eschatalogical language--everyone is waiting for the end.

2) Seminary students joke that all theological works in German come in 2 volumes: all the verbs are in the second one.

Business

German products have such a high international reputation because Germans are trained from birth to pay attention all the way to the end. (Comment made by a student in a college Business German course.)

[appalachiablue]

1. Studying German in college was wild, verbs at the end yep. Indian

friends from Punjab say that's the same in their language.

[geardaddy]

2. In the Celtic languages, the verb comes at the beginning.

Kind of Yoda-like.

Sang I the song.

Canais i'r cân.

[bobbieinok]

3. Took me a while to see why I had no prob w/ German's 4 cases--6 cases in Latin

2 yrs of Latin in HS (and 2 yrs of French)--started German in sophomore yr of college (and 3 more yrs of French, 1 yr of Russian)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

5. After Latin everything else seems fairly easy.

Except for Icelandic.

[bobbieinok]

6. In grad school I took Old Norse and Advanced Old Norse. Icelandic the closest modern language?

Really liked some things we read. There was a short saga in which a young Thor constantly throws temper tantrums, swinging his hammer like mad.

Love German word for Thursday (Thors day) -- Donnerstag = thunder day (thunder is caused by Thor swinging his hammer)

[The Velveteen Ocelot]

7. Icelandic is basically what Norwegian was 1,000 years ago (Old Norse).

That must have been an interesting study. Same days in modern Norwegian: Tuesday=Tirsdag (Týr's day), Wednesday=Onsdag (Odin's day), Thursday=Torsdag (Thor's day), Friday=Fredag (Freyja's day). Old Norse is also pretty closely related to Old English - both use the old letters thorn and eth. I took a short course on the Prose Edda recently - really fascinating stuff.

[aka-chmeee]

4. Highly recommend Mark Twain's "The Awful German Language" nt

[Leith]

8. You Beat Me to It

"I would rather decline 2 beers than one German noun."

[aka-chmeee]

9. To me, one of the funniest essays he wrote.

As a casual(very) student of The Awful German Language, I see all of the demons which torture the native english speaker who's trying to learn German. Of course, you strip away just the havoc done to articles by gender and it becomes a little less unwieldy.
I have often wondered if the German reputation for precision is in any way connected to the strictures of their language.