The Awful German Language (a Mark Twain essay)

[saffronhare]

I came across a link to this essay in the commentary on juno_magic's journal (though I have no idea how I got there). It's got me laughing so hard that I'm grateful to be spewing coffee from my nose, because it means I'm less likely to be peeing my pants.

http://www.crossmyt.com/hc/linghebr/awfgrmlg.html#x1

It's particularly amusing because I just finished saying in my GSP submission for Indo-European Language 1 that I found German to be reassuringly logical, if over-structured. (shrug) Oh, the irony! Es gibt mir Schmerz!

Comments

[zylch.livejournal.com]

Ich sehe das Buch Die Legionen des Augustus: Der römische Soldat im archäologischen Experiment (255 Seiten) und ich Schmerzen habe.

[fionnabhar.livejournal.com]

You 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.

::Gekicher::