# why Are English and German So Different in Grammar?



## Aydintashar

While the two languages are thought to be closely linked in the Germanic group, and the vocabulary testifies this theory, yet the grammars are so different:
1 - German contains inflected nouns, adjectives, and even articles, while English doesn't.
2 - German has gender (masculine, feminine, neutral), while English hasn't. Even the plural is treated as a kind of gender in German.
3 - The word order is different. German composite sentence is sometimes absolutely similar to Turkish.
I know that English shared a lot of features with German in the past, but lost them during evolution. But, how can two close members of a group behave so differently, one of them behaving in a tough conservative way, the other in an absolutely flexible manner, to such an extent that it lost almost 90% of its inflectional suffixes and other grammatical features in a period of about a thousand years? You may not notice such a big difference in behaviour in other closely linked languages such as French/Italian or Arabic/Hebrew.


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## miguel89

English people had to underwent many upheavals throughout its history. There was, at first, the migration from the continent to the islands. In there they found other peoples with which they had to interact to some degree. Secondly, the Danish invasion. Thirdly and obviously, the Norman invasion. Norman was the language of the aristocracy for some time. Beside all of this, the internal struggles between kingdoms before the Norman invasion changed the center of prestige continuously. All these factors must have affected the language's evolution.


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## Kevin Beach

My understanding is that the principle cause for the erosion of most inflections in the transition from Old English to Middle English was its meeting with Norse after the Danish colonisation of most of the southern and eastern parts of the country towards the end of the first millennium. Speakers of each language found common roots in the two vocabularies, but different endings and constructions. The way to mutual intelligibility between these two Germanic tongues was to abandon the inflections and concentrate on the roots.


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## Aydintashar

Although political upheavals may have played a significant role in language change, it is highly improbable that a language would have lost a major part of its grammatical features due to some invasion. Even if case endings had to be disposed of due to Danish invasion, what about gender? As far as I know, the other similar case is that of Persian, whose grammar is free of case endings, gender and the dual category, whereas it ancestors are supposed to have the above features in a large scale. Some of its nearest relatives such as Kurdish still contain those features.
Almost all living languages have undergone similar political upheavals, but almost all contemporary European and a lot of other languages contain gender and nominal inflection (including nouns, adjectives and articles).


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## berndf

There are mainly two types of argument:
1) Some kind of "creole" theory as Kevin mentioned which suspects the loss of inflections may be do to a mixing with Danish and French and
2) the theory that the weakening of unstressed suffix syllables (loss of almost all full vowels) make the declension markers to unspecific to be effective and they were subsequently lost.

Both theories aren't satisfactory in my humble opinion. The former for the reasons you mentioned and the second because German underwent the same phonological process at the transition from Old to Middle High German yet retained the full declension system.


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## Kevin Beach

Ah, yes, but the point about the OE/Norse theory is not just that there was an invasion, but that the invaders settled and spoke a language that was fairly closely related. Therefore the way to make the languages mutually intelligible was to remove the differences between them.


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## Istriano

English still has genders, but they are natural, just like in Dravidian languages and unlike IndoAryan languages,  man is always masculine, girl is always feminine, a book is neutral.
Don't you think it's kind of bizarre that _girl _is neutral in German (_das Mädchen_) and even the wife used to be neutral (_das Weib_).

The only remnant of that usage very akin to contemporary German is the feminine nature of the word ship:   _Titanic was a nice ship. Everyone was so sad when she sank.

_English is no isolated case. Why is French grammar so different than the Italian one (Pronoun subjects obligatory in French, gerund absent in French).
Why is Malayalam grammar so different than the grammar of other Dravidian languages (Verbs don't have inflections of person).

Why Macedonian and Bulgarian are so different than the other Slavic languages, there are no declension, but there are articles!

Macedonian and Serbian are almost as distant grammatically as German and English!



English has always been an absorbing language, almost like a sponge:

1. it is one of the richest languages when it comes to vocabulary, for almost every word there are many perfect synonyms of different origin (Germanic vs Latin):
_freedom _or _liberty_, _feeling _or _emotion  _and so on
   (the only similar language is Malayalam which has one word of Dravidian origin and one of Sanskrit origin for almost everything
    and unlike differences in Hindi which are artificially made, all speakers of Malayalam are fine with both words, for example:
   water is _jelam _or _vellam_; the Moon is _tingel _or _chandre _)

2. as English morphology was simplified, its syntax got more complicated

English vs German: English has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax
Macedonian vs Russian: Macedonian has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax
Cape Verdean creole vs Portuguese: Cape Verdean has simplified morphology, but much more complicate syntax

 The difference between Creoles and English (or Macedonian) is that the
grammar of English has not been borrowed from another language (unlike in Cabo Verdean creole which borrowed its syntax from local African languages),
simplification of morphology and gradual ''complication'' of syntax was a completely internal process.


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## Brioche

Istriano said:


> English still has genders, but they are natural, just like in Dravidian languages and unlike IndoAryan languages,  man is always masculine, girl is always feminine, a book is neutral.
> Don't you think it's kind of bizarre that _girl _is neutral in German (_das Mädchen_) and even the wife used to be neutral (_das Weib_).



IMHO, modern English does not have gender. "Natural gender" is just sex.

Furthermore, gender would not seem so bizarre if we called the genders say, _earth words_ if they are like die Erde, _wind words_ if they are like der Wind, and _fire words_ if they are like das Feuer.

Das Mädchen is naturally a "fire word" because all -chen diminutives are "fire words".

In general terms, we can describe how languages have changed over the years, but I don't know that we can really say "why" such and such changes occurred.


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## Aydintashar

Istriano said:


> ...
> English has always been an absorbing language, almost like a sponge:
> 
> 1. it is one of the richest languages when it comes to vocabulary, for almost every word there are many perfect synonyms of different origin (Germanic vs Latin):
> _freedom _or _liberty_, _feeling _or _emotion  _and so on
> ...
> 2. as English morphology was simplified, its syntax got more complicated
> 
> English vs German: English has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax
> ...
> 
> simplification of morphology and gradual ''complication'' of syntax was a completely internal process.




The borrowings in large volume occurred almost for any language during 17-20 centuries, not limited to a so called "sponge" language. This was due to social and technological revolutions. If we disregard this part of  the lexical content, the basic lexical contents of both German and English remain similar and very Germanic. Since grammar is more resistant to change, a "sponge" language should have undergone much more lexical changes than grammatical. So, I am not very much in favour of the sponge theory.
I also disagree that English morphology has been simplified in exchange for its syntax getting more complicated. I think both the morphology and syntax of German are more complicated than English. Lack of case endings and gender prevents English from complex syntax. Easier morphology always permits easier syntax. This forces the speaker to use short, consecutive subordinate sentences in place of long, complex principal sentences.


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## berndf

Istriano said:


> English vs German: English has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax


This is the first time I hear anyone claim English syntax to be more complicated that German syntax. You really surprise me. Can you substantiate this?


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## Frank06

Hi,


Aydintashar said:


> I also disagree that English morphology has been simplified in exchange for its syntax getting more complicated. I think both the morphology and syntax of German are more complicated than English. Lack of case endings and gender prevents English from complex syntax. _Easier morphology always permits easier syntax._


Do you mean a more fixed syntax?
Dutch, the language in between (I mean geographically) has an "easier" morphology than German (e.g. no case system, hence not unsimilar to English), but the syntax is not unsimilar to German syntax, for example what inversion is concerned, and what the subordinate clause is concerned.


> This forces the speaker to use short, consecutive subordinate sentences in place of long, complex principal sentences.


I don't see how this follows from lacking case endings _and gender_. At least, if I understand you well... 

Khoda hafez,

Frank


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## Istriano

berndf said:


> This is the first time I hear anyone claim English syntax to be more complicated that German syntax. You really surprise me. Can you substantiate this?



How many tenses does contemporary spoken German have, only two: present and perfect  I wouldn't call it a rich system.
Even future tense is rarely used in speech and simple past is used only with a handful of verbs. 

In English,
_I will do it
I'm going to do it
I will be doing it...

I am doing it
I do it...

I have done it
I've been doing it.

I did it
I was doing it.

I had done it
I had been doing it...
_
All are used in speech.

Colloquial English has subtle nuances absent from German. Old German had a verbal system similar to the English one (_It has rained = Es hat geregnet _different than _It rained = Es regnete_)
but it has been reduced to a small number of tenses.
Also, English is very gerund friendly: _My going away has nothing to do with her moving in._


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## Frank06

Istriano said:


> How many tenses does contemporary spoken German have, only two: present and perfect  I wouldn't call it a rich system.


Sorry if I misunderstand, but I thought the question was about the _syntax_.

F


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## berndf

English has an aspect (progressive) which German is lacking.
The distinction between present perfect and past tense is stricter than in German.
The use of the future tense, or lack thereof, is roughly the same in German and English.
The use of the subjective mood is different (more restrictive) in English than in German.
Past subjunctive and conditional are equivalent in German but not in English.
German has a systematic differentiation of active vs. stative passive forms which English is lacking
This can hardly justify such a bold claim; especially given the quasi-complete lack of case and gender systems (which are not only morphological but also syntactic concepts) in English and the much more complex sentence structure in German.


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## Istriano

berndf said:


> (The use of the future tense, or lack thereof, is roughly the same in German and English.)
> .


  This is not true.
I have never ever heard a German speaking person using a future tense in colloquial speech.

*I'll get the door *is the way to say it in English
while
*
Ich werde die Tür öffnen* is never used in spoken German.




> just for the sake of comparison, it should be noted that English  probably has *the* most complex verbal system out of all the Germanic  languages, even though its verbal inflection is relatively modest by  Germanic standards (on par with the continental North Germanic  languages, less than that of High German and Low German languages other  than Afrikaans, and greater than that of Afrikaans).
> 
> German *morphology* is more complex than that of Dutch and English, but  from everything I have seen, its overall syntax and usage is simpler  than that of both Dutch and English.  For instance, to use my favorite  example of this, while German verb morphology is more complex than that  of English, much of that only really has to be memorized once, and its  actual verb usage is much simpler than that of English which is quite  complex with respect to verb tense and aspect and how such are expressed  syntactically.


http://www.antimoon.com/forum/t9124-15.htm


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## Aydintashar

Frank06 said:


> Hi,
> 
> ...
> I don't see how this follows from lacking case endings _and gender_. At least, if I understand you well...
> 
> Khoda hafez,
> 
> Frank




When the words contain suffixes that define their syntactic relationship with respect to other components of the sentence, they get the possibility of moving around in the sentence without being confused. This is because the case endings and other suffixes act as a kind of identity card for them. Thus, the long complex sentence becomes easy to build. The English way of building subordinate sentences is the following famous example:

_This is the house that Jack built._

This can be translated into German in 2 possible ways:

1 - Das ist das Haus, daß von Walter gebaut wurde.
2 - Das ist das von Walter gebautes Haus.

As you can see, there is no way to build a sentence like the number 2 in English. This is, I think, a good example for the complexity of German syntax. This leads to the possibility of building sentences like this:

_Die seit fast zwei Jahren festgehaltenen kriegsgefangenen wurden endlich freigelassen.
_

_The prisoners of war, who had been detained almost for two years were finally released._


As you can see, the English version needs a "who-" sentence. Even if you drop the "who", the sentence still consists of a principal and a subordinate sentence. Also, note that "kriegsgefangenen" itself replaces a sentence, because it means: "those who were arrested in the war".

I think it is only very obvious that German syntax is more complex, but it does not follow that its expressive power is higher.

_Khoda Hafez_


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## berndf

Istriano said:


> This is not true.
> I have never ever heard a German speaking person using a future tense in colloquial speech.


The logic is exactly the same: If it is clear by context that a future action is ment, future tense can be replaced by present tense.


Istriano said:


> *Ich werde die Tür öffnen* is never used in spoken German.


If this is true then I don't speak German.


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## Frank06

Aydintashar said:


> When the words contain suffixes that define their syntactic relationship with respect to other components of the sentence, they get the possibility of moving around in the sentence without being confused. This is because the case endings and other suffixes act as a kind of identity card for them. Thus, the long complex sentence becomes easy to build. The English way of building subordinate sentences is the following famous example:
> [...]
> As you can see, there is no way to build a sentence like the number 2 in English. This is, I think, a good example for the complexity of German syntax. This leads to the possibility of building sentences like this:
> 
> _Die seit fast zwei Jahren festgehaltenen kriegsgefangenen wurden endlich freigelassen.
> _


I do realise very well that this thread is about German and English, so maybe my remark about Dutch is off topic again. So, I'll use the small font to say that I am getting curious about examples from the Skandinavian Germanic languages. 

The above German sentence can be translated into Dutch. It's almost almost word by word the same:
'De sinds ruim twee jaar vastgehouden krijgsgevangenen zullen eindelijk vrijgelaten worden'
Even though this is not the most elegant Dutch sentence, it is grammatically correct (and the construction _is_ used). Again, Dutch has _no_ cases. And the German example above has, if I am not mistaken, only the nominative case. 

Otherwise said , I fail to see the point of the German example within this context and I still fail to see what the example above has to do with case endings and gender.

Take care and forgive me if I am too daft about it, but my head is a bit slow today.

Frank


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## berndf

Frank06 said:


> I do realise very well that this thread is about German and English, so maybe my remark about Dutch is off topic again. So, I'll use the small font to say that I am getting curious about examples from the Skandinavian Germanic languages.


I have to contradict you here. The comparison to Dutch grammar which is very similar to the German one just without a case system as very relevant to the argument you are responding to.



Frank06 said:


> And the German example above has, if I am not mistaken, only the nominative case.


Well, _zwei Jahren_ is dative. But it doesn't add much information since the dative is required by the preposition _seit_ which immediately preceeds the noun phrase _fast zwei Jahren_; so the inflection (_Jahre>Jahren_) is not needed here to form a bracket between preposition and noun phrase.


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## sokol

Istriano said:


> This is not true.
> I have never ever heard a German speaking person using a future tense in colloquial speech.
> 
> *I'll get the door *is the way to say it in English
> while
> *
> Ich werde die Tür öffnen* is never used in spoken German.


Is the German variety you know best Austrian German?

Austrians indeed make rare use of future tense, in colloquial speech. I would consider it very much possible that you've never heard Austrians use future colloquially (even though they do, but not too frequently ).


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## locutus

Aydintashar said:


> While the two languages are thought to be closely linked in the Germanic group, and the vocabulary testifies this theory, yet the grammars are so different:
> 1 - German contains inflected nouns, adjectives, and even articles, while English doesn't.
> 2 - German has gender (masculine, feminine, neutral), while English hasn't. Even the plural is treated as a kind of gender in German.
> 3 - The word order is different. German composite sentence is sometimes absolutely similar to Turkish.
> I know that English shared a lot of features with German in the past, but lost them during evolution. But, how can two close members of a group behave so differently, one of them behaving in a tough conservative way, the other in an absolutely flexible manner, to such an extent that it lost almost 90% of its inflectional suffixes and other grammatical features in a period of about a thousand years? You may not notice such a big difference in behaviour in other closely linked languages such as French/Italian or Arabic/Hebrew.



Going back to the OP's original query...I have understood that these losses of inflectional endings and such, relate to the Norman Conquest and the following three hundred years of the Norman French being the dominant language of the powerful and influential...in effect, English was reduced to a "peasant language"  ...a language of the uneducated and illiterate... The language simplified because that was the best its users could make of it.  Later for reasons that I don't understand, it re-emerged as the language of the aristocracy...

It seems a somewhat similar process was at work with the gradual evolution of the various Romance languages... A hint of this process can be found in Petronius' novel, Satyricon....Trimalchio's Dinner...in the speech of the rich, but uneducated, freedmen.....


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## Aydintashar

Frank06 said:


> ...
> The above German sentence can be translated into Dutch. It's almost almost word by word the same:
> 'De sinds ruim twee jaar vastgehouden krijgsgevangenen zullen eindelijk vrijgelaten worden'
> Even though this is not the most elegant Dutch sentence, it is grammatically correct (and the construction _is_ used). Again, Dutch has _no_ cases. And the German example above has, if I am not mistaken, only the nominative case.
> 
> Otherwise said , I fail to see the point of the German example within this context and I still fail to see what the example above has to do with case endings and gender.
> ...
> Frank



Your Dutch examples are very useful in this discussion, because Dutch demonstrates the half way between German and English as far as the case endings are concerned. Within the languages that I know, I am almost convinced that the languages employing case endings are capable of building complex sentences in the sense that, each component of the sentence may represent a full sentence. The languages without case endings are forced to use short, consecutive sentences instead. If you can demonstrate that Dutch is really capable of acting in the German way, then my opinion has to be revised, but let's be sure first. 
I am providing a slightly more complicated German sentence. Please verify that it is expressable in Dutch with a similar sentence structure. The sentence, does not look colloquial at all, but it is considered very ordinary in journalistic language.

Ich möchte mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung  der Öffentlichket zu stellenden Zug erreichenden Gästen begrüßen.

_I wish to greet the guests, who are arriving with the train, that is supposed to be available to the public in the near future._

But, let's not forget that the topic of this thread is to investigate why English lost all its grammatical features in a period in which almost all other Germanic languages retained them. The grammar should have been more resistant than the vocabulary.


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## berndf

Aydintashar, in the sample sentence there are a few mistakes:





Aydintashar said:


> Ich möchte *die* mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichke*i*t zu stellenden Zug *zu* erreichenden *Gäste* begrüßen.
> 
> _I wish to greet the guests, who *can be reached by the train* that is supposed to be available to the public in the near future._


Unfortunately, the missing _die_ and _zu_ and the wrong declension of _Gäste _(_Gästen_ is dative but _begrüßen_ requires accusative) not only render the sentence ungrammatical but also completely unintelligible to a native speaker. It took me at least 10 times reading to understand what might have been meant and another 10 times to figure out where the error was. There is an alternative rectification: you could omit _die_ but then_ zu __erreichenden Gäste_ has to become _zu __erreichende Gäste_ (i.e. strong rather than weak declension of the adjective).

I originally wanted to send you this note by PM but then decided to post it instead because these errors nicely underline your point: If these simple errors render a sentence unintelligible it shows how important an elaborate declension system is for making such sentence structures possible.


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> ...
> I originally wanted to send you this note by PM but then decided to post it instead because these errors nicely underline your point: If these simple errors render a sentence unintelligible it shows how important an elaborate declension system is for making such sentence structures possible.



I am happy that my mistakes were so useful in clarifying the matter! You have shown beyond doubt how important the correct use of case endings is in order to make a composite sentence possible and meaningful. By the way, would you please build the German sentence in the meaning that I indicated i.e.,

_I wish to greet the guests, who are to arrive with the train, that will be made available to the public in the near future.
_
Thanks,
Aydin


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## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> _I wish to greet the guests, who are to arrive with the train, that will be made available to the public in the near future._


_Ich möchte die mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden *demnächst ankommenden* Gäste begrüßen._

The sentence - whether with _zu erreichenden _or with_ ankommenden_ - is possible but absolutely awful. You are aware of that, aren't you?


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> _Ich möchte die mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden *demnächst ankommenden* Gäste begrüßen._
> 
> The sentence - whether with _zu erreichenden _or with_ ankommenden_ - is possible but absolutely awful. You are aware of that, aren't you?



I know that this kind of sentence is not used in everyday life, and specially not by the common people. Your mother tongue is German, and you know that professional texts contain a certain degree of the typical German composite sentences, without being considered awful.
At this point, I would like to make reference to Turkish, which has no gender, but case endings for nouns only. This language allows composite sentences in any degree, completely familiar for the common people, and extensively used by them. I try to translate the train story into Turkish (Turkey version):

- Yakında kamu istifadesine verilecek trenle yetişen misafirleri karşılamak istiyorum.
_- In near future - to public use - shall be released - with train - arriving guests - to greet - I wish._

The syllables indicated in red are case endings. The first (e) is dative, the second (le) is instrumental, and the third (i) is accusative. Without these case endings, it would have been impossible to build the composite sentence in a meaningful way. Even if it were possible to build a certain sentence, it would have been very ambiguous. It would have been impossible to tell _who is going to greet what, who is travelling with the train_, and _what will be provided for public use_. In order to avoid these ambiguities, the speaker would be forced to use use simple consecutive sentences linked by conjunctives.


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## Frank06

Hi,


Aydintashar said:


> Your Dutch examples are very useful in this discussion, because Dutch demonstrates the half way between German and English as far as the case endings are concerned.


No, not half way what cases are concerned. Dutch has as many cases as English, viz. none. That's not half way.


> If you can demonstrate that Dutch is really capable of acting in the German way, then my opinion has to be revised, but let's be sure first.


I don't think so. That's your homework .

You gave a theory, with examples in German. I gave counterexamples, well, actually merely word-by-word translations from German to Dutch. Those translations clearly indicate that your theory, _in its present form_, isn't a 100% valid.
What you need to do is _not_ to give more examples from German or other languages which would prove your theory to be valid. 
First of all you need to discuss the counterexamples slash translations I gave you, counterexamples which clearly indicate that_ so far_ (stress on so far), your theory needs quite some rephrasing and more precise wordings and definitions, for example what concerns "complicated" and "more complicated" (before you're giving us the impression that you're moving the goalposts).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Aydintashar

Frank06 said:


> ...
> What you need to do is _not_ to give more examples from German or other languages which would prove your theory to be valid.



In order to test a theory effectively, one has to consider more and more examples, possibly from different languages. It is really not reliable to test a theory using only one example from Dutch. I am familiar with Dutch, but am not capable of using its grammatical capacities. That is why, I thought, you would help me learn.

I would also like to stress that case category is present in all languages, because it represents the relationship of nouns with  other sentence components. Therefore, the statement that "Dutch does not have any cases" cannot be possibly true. What we are concerned with, is the presence or absence of case endings, which act as identity card for the noun in the sentence.

Güle güle,
Aydin


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## Frank06

Hi,


Aydintashar said:


> In order to test a theory effectively, one has to consider more and more examples, possibly from different languages.


Agreed, and that's why I am still curious about examples from other Germanic languages, the North Germanic ones. Even if that would take opening a new thread. 


> It is really not reliable to test a theory using only one example from Dutch. I am familiar with Dutch, but am not capable of using its grammatical capacities.


I agree that one or two examples from Dutch might only be an indication. But an indication that the theory, which I can follow up to a certain point, needs some refining. Or at least that the examples you presented so far need to be picked out more carefully. Another problem I have is that  so far, words as "complex" have been used. I need a description which is more clear. Which constructions are you talking about (not just 'complex' structures).  


> That is why, I thought, you would help me learn.


See you in my class ;-). I'm sorry, in this period, I'm quite busy. I didn't even want to get _actively_ in involved in this thread.


> I would also like to stress that case category is present in all languages, because it represents the relationship of nouns with  other sentence components. Therefore, the statement that "Dutch does not have any cases" cannot be possibly true. What we are concerned with, is the presence or absence of case endings, which act as identity card for the noun in the sentence.


I don't find it very useful to talk about case endings when there is no productive case system (anymore). 
Apart from a few relics, the pronouns (with a bit of fantasy) and a genitive (with even more fantasy), Modern Dutch doesn't have a productive case system. Just like English. I am even a bit reluctant to call that genitive a case, since, as said before, there is no productive _case system_ anymore.
Or do we mean something different when talking about cases?



> Güle güle,


. I sure will. You too.

Frank


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## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> I know that this kind of sentence is not used in everyday life, and specially not by the common people. Your mother tongue is German, and you know that professional texts contain a certain degree of the typical German composite sentences, without being considered awful.


Well, this sentence could be taken from a text book how not to construct German sentences. It is just awful. It even isn't a composite sentence, it just contains a long and messy noun phrase, but syntactically it is just one simple main clause.


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> Well, this sentence could be taken from a text book how not to construct German sentences. It is just awful. It even isn't a composite sentence, it just contains a long and messy noun phrase, but syntactically it is just one simple main clause.



Whether my proposed sentences are sound or not, does not influence the present discussion. The fact is that German is able to use extended participle constructions in place of almost each component of the sentence. In other words, the subject, object, adjective and adverbs etc., each or all can be either simple words or participal constructions simultaneously:

_- Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk._
_- Der schnell vorbeifahrende Zug machte großen Lärm._
_- Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept._

I think this capacity is absent in English, which in my opinion is due to lack of case endings. I am also convinced of this fact by analysing Turkish and Arabic (both strongly inflected), and Persian (no inflection), which support the theory. 
Almost any language is capable of using the present and past participle as adjectives or nouns (_the coming year, the forgotten story_), but German uses full sentences for this purpose. 
As I pointed out somewhere in this thread, the case category is always present, otherwise, one could not distinguish between the subject and object (whether of accusative, locative, dative ablative or dative directive). We are concerned with case endings and the function that they fulfill in the sentence.
Last but not least, this thread was about the drastic grammatical differences between English and German, searching the reason why the two cousin languages fell into so different categories. The only _relatively _convincing explanation provided in this thread was the Viking invasion theory, but the phenomenon looks still strange.


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## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> I think this capacity is absent in English, which in my opinion is due to lack of case endings.


I am not so sure, I English you say
_This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._
Of course, you can interpret this as a relative clause with an implied relative pronoun (_which_) but you can also interpret this as a post-positioned adjective, reflecting French word order (a language also lacking case markers):
_C'est une recette déjà utilisée dans le Moyen Âge. _


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> I am not so sure, I English you say
> _This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._
> Of course, you can interpret this as a relative clause with an implied relative pronoun (_which_) but you can also interpret this as a post-positioned adjective, reflecting French word order (a language also lacking case markers):
> _C'est un recette déjà utilisé dans le Moyen Âge. _



Of course, it is a relative clause. The participal constructions have a much more extended function and may replace almost all components of the sentence, and may carry a lot of sentence features, such as tense, personal pronouns, and even (in certain languages like Turkish) other participal clauses embedded within themselves in several levels! In the example:

_- He is familiar with the book that is going to be published next week, by a publisher that was established 5 year ago.
_
all the parts printed in red can be expressed as a participal clause serving as the adjective for "book", in a quite familiar way, understandable by common people. As you can see, different languages show different capacities for utilisation of participal clauses, and the reason for the extended capacity of Turkish, in my opinion, is, apart from case endings, due also to its agglutinative nature.


----------



## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> Of course, it is a relative clause.


I can't see how
_C'est une recette déjà utilisée dans le Moyen Âge. _ 
could be understood having as a relative clause


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> I can't see how
> _C'est une recette déjà utilisée dans le Moyen Âge. _
> could be understood having as a relative clause



Use of adjectives after nouns is no longer usual in English. Whenever such combinations are encountered, they are treated as foreign, and most often French. Omission of conjunctions in relative clauses is very common in English, it should not take us to the belief that the clause is a repositioned adjective. Even if you consider it as an adjective clause, you have demonstrated the extremely weak capacity of English in building participal clauses. The participal clauses popular in inflected languages demonstrate numerous features similar to a sentence, that is far greater than a mere  adjective. In short, participal clauses are syntactic structures compressed into a morphological unit.


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## berndf

I wasn't speaking of English but of French which also lacks case markers.


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> I wasn't speaking of English but of French which is also lacking case markers.


I haven't a good command of French, so I cannot comment confidently. Maybe, it is confused with an adjective, simply because the natural position of adjectives in French is after the noun. If a language exhibits capacities for participal clauses, this capacity should be somewhat extensive in the sense that, at least some sentence components such as adjectives, adverbs, nouns (as subject or different forms of object) can be replaced with sentence-like participal constructions. Such languages usually use single, principal sentences, whose components may consist of participal constructions. The opposite is true in case of languages, which use simple, consecutive, subordinate clauses, each adding some meaning to one of the components of the main sentence. I think there are only these two main architectures, and each language uses a mixture of them, while having a strong tendency towards one of them. Then, may I ask your opinion as to which type French belongs to?


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## berndf

I am not really sure what you are after. A participle *is* an adjective (which can also be used adverbially) and the German sentence _Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept_ there is also a participle serving as an attributive adjective.


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> I am not really sure what you are after. A participle *is* an adjective (which can also be used adverbially) and the German sentence _Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept_ there is also a participle serving as an attributive adjective.



The difference is that, a participle or participle construction is not an adjective in the lexical sense, it is a syntactic structure fulfilling the function of not only adjective, but also practically any other constituent of the sentence.


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## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> The difference is that, a participle or participle construction is not an adjective in the lexical sense, it is a syntactic structure fulfilling the function of not only adjective, but also practically any other constituent of the sentence.


And? How does German differ from English (since you say your command of French isn't sufficient I won't use French examples any more) in this respect? I understand less and less of what you're driving at.
_
Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk. - A King elected by patricians governs the people.
Der schnell vorbeifahrende Zug machte großen Lärm. - The fast going train makes a lot of noise.
Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept. - This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._

In all three cases participle constructs serve as attributes in noun phrases and are functionally equivalent in the two languages. I can't see how case makers give German a greater flexibility in this respect.

Where I agree with you is that German can support more complex nested structures than English because of the extra redundancy provided.


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> _
> ...
> __ Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk. - A King elected by patricians governs the people.
> Der schnell vorbeifahrende Zug machte großen Lärm. - The fast going train makes a lot of noise.
> Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept. - This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._
> 
> In all three cases participle constructs serve as attributes in noun phrases and are functionally equivalent in the two languages. I can't see how case makers give German a greater flexibility in this respect.
> 
> Where I agree with you is that German can support more complex nested structures than English because of the extra redundancy provided.



The difference I am focusing on, is that in German the participal clause replaces (in the examples given) the adjective grammatically (not lexically). The same task is fulfilled in English by using subordinate clauses. Since subordinate clauses are simple, the relationship between the subject, verb and object is obvious. So, no information is lost. If we try to build Germanlike sentences in English, we would introduce a lot of ambiguity, apart from the fact that the sentence will sound unnatural. It is because the case endings used in the participal clause serve to define the relationship between different components. Without their activity, we couldn't tell _who is going fast, who is making noise, and who governs whom_. The complex nested structures that you mention, I think, are all participal clauses, which owe their validity to case endings. I don't understand the function of redundency in this respect. Can you provide examples of redundancy enabling German to build complex nested structures? Thanks


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## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> I don't understand the function of redundency in this respect. Can you provide examples of redundancy enabling German to build complex nested structures? Thanks


In most cases adjective agreement is not needed to understand a construct. In _ein rot*er* Tisch_ and _ein*e* rot*e* Lampe _the gender suffixes are not really needed, _ein rot Tisch_ or _ein rot Lampe_ would be equally understandable. Often case markers are also redundant because prepositions require certain cases, like the dative in _mit de*m* Hammer_. In complex phrases, this helps to resolve ambiguities and failure to use correct case markers renders a complex sentence unintelligible, like in #22 where you used _Gästen _(dative) instead of _Gäste_ (accusative), while for less complex sentences, such mistakes are easily corrected by the listener (_Ich möchte die *Gästen begrü__ß__en_)


----------



## Frank06

berndf said:


> And? How does German differ from English (since you say your command of French isn't sufficient I won't use French examples any more) in this respect? I understand less and less of what you're driving at.
> _
> Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk. - A King elected by patricians governs the people.
> Der schnell vorbeifahrende Zug machte großen Lärm. - The fast going train makes a lot of noise.
> Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept. - This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._
> 
> In all three cases participle constructs serve as attributes in noun phrases and are functionally equivalent in the two languages. I can't see how case makers give German a greater flexibility in this respect.


Since the three German sentences once again can be translated into Dutch, word-by-word (and hence following the exact same syntactic patterns as in German), you may add me to the list of confused ones.

So far, the only German sentences which I could not translate word-by-word  were the incorrect ones...

Frank


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## Aydintashar

berndf said:


> In most cases adjective agreement is not needed to understand a construct. In _ein rot*er* Tisch_ and _ein*e* rot*e* Lampe _the gender suffixes are not really needed, _ein rot Tisch_ or _ein rot Lampe_ would be equally understandable. Often case markers are also redundant because prepositions require certain cases, like the dative in _mit de*m* Hammer_. In complex phrases, this helps to resolve ambiguities and failure to use correct case markers renders a complex sentence unintelligible, like in #22 where you used _Gästen _(dative) instead of _Gäste_ (accusative), while for less complex sentences, such mistakes are easily corrected by the listener (_Ich möchte die *Gästen begrü__ß__en_)



In the expression "ein roter Tisch" there is no redundancy. This combination indicates that it is either in the stand-alone status, or is going to participate in the sentence as subject, but not as object or genitive. The same is true of "eine rote Lampe". The case endings are preparations for entering a syntactic construct.
In general, the significance of case endings is not manifest in simple situations. They become manifest when handling complicated structures as with the participal constructions, specially when they are nested. Nothing seems superfluous or redundant. German uses more morphological material, which enables it to built complex participal constructions, whereas English relies mainly on subordinate sentences. In the end, both of them achieve their goal, each in its own way.
I still think that languages lacking case signallers are not able to build complex participal constructions, because they cannot control the relationship of different components, and therefore lead to ambiguity.


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## Istriano

Aydintashar said:


> I still think that languages lacking case signallers are not able to build complex participal constructions, because they cannot control the relationship of different components, and therefore lead to ambiguity.


I don't agree, compare these two sentences

1. formal written Brazilian Portuguese and general Continental Portuguese
2. spoken Brazilian Portuguese


1.  a casa em que moro
(def article+House+in+that+(I)+live)

2.  a casa que eu moro
em [in] omitted, and subject is introduced (eu)

2. a casa que eu moro nela
(lit:  A house that I live in it)
_
[a house I live in]_
-----------------

1. um amigo cujo pai não conheço
(def article+Friend+whose+father+not+(know)

2. o amigo que eu não conheço o pai dele
(lit: the friend that I don't know his father)

[the friend whose father I don't know]

Spoken Brazilian Portuguese has simplified its morphology, but the syntax is much more complex, and topicalization is closer to Chinese than to other Romance languages. Word order has changed, it is no longer free, inversion is not possible with transitive verbs anymore


Simplifying morphology does not mean simplifying syntax. Spoken Brazilian Portuguese may be devoid of inflected imperative but the personal infinitive is still there:
_
É preciso comprar*es* isso para poder*mos* viajar_. (inflected  personal infinitive).

Saying the same without inflection:

_É preciso *você *comprar isso para *a gente *poder viajar._

[it's necessary for you to buy this so we can travel]

So, the morphology was simplified, but the syntax did not,
now there is a difference between:

_Quem conhece você? _= Who knows you? and
_Quem você conhece?_ = Whom do you know?

Just a 100 years ago (when morphology of spoken Brazilian Portuguese was more complex) these two underlined phrases meant the same because the word order in questions was free...But as morphology was simplified, complex syntax relations were introduced, so syntax got more complex.


PS
As for ambiguity, it can be solved by introducing many redundancies, that's why Spanish syntax is more complex than the German one.
German grammar was one of the easiest for me to learn, both morphology and syntax were easy, but German vocabulary was a problem for me so I quit a few years ago.


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## berndf

Aydintashar said:


> In the expression "ein roter Tisch" there is no redundancy.


Attributive adjectives are identified by position. There is no need to identify them by declension markers what so ever. Actually, in nominative and accusative declension of attributive adjectives was until about 200 years optional. Today there are still same frozen idioms where attributive adjectives are not declined, like "gut Ding will Weile haben" ("gut" instead of "gutes").


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## Forero

berndf said:


> And? How does German differ from English (since you say your command of French isn't sufficient I won't use French examples any more) in this respect? I understand less and less of what you're driving at.
> _
> Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk. - A King elected by patricians governs the people.
> Der schnell vorbeifahrende Zug machte großen Lärm. - The fast going train makes a lot of noise.
> Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept. - This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._
> 
> In all three cases participle constructs serve as attributes in noun phrases and are functionally equivalent in the two languages. I can't see how case makers give German a greater flexibility in this respect.
> 
> Where I agree with you is that German can support more complex nested structures than English because of the extra redundancy provided.


What the cases allow you to do in German is something like:

_ Großen Lärm__ machte d__er schnell vorbeifahrende Zug._

"A lot of noise makes the fast traveling train" sounds ridiculous because the train appears to be a direct object. If this is a possible German sentence, the word _der_ is what makes it possible.


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## Istriano

But you can always rephrase it:
_
It is a lot of noise what the fast traveling train makes..._

Also, don't forget the famous song

*What  difference a day makes...*

where _day _is clearly the subject  forget it not


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## berndf

Forero said:


> What the cases allow you to do in German is something like:
> 
> _ Großen Lärm__ machte d__er schnell vorbeifahrende Zug._
> 
> "A lot of noise makes the fast traveling train" sounds ridiculous because the train appears to be a direct object. If this is a possible German sentence, the word _der_ is what makes it possible.


Case makers allow higher flexibility of word order. I think we all agree about this.

Just a little side note with respect to my earlier claim that adjective declension markers are often redundant: There are actually two markers identifying subject/object:
_Groß*en* Lärm__ machte *d*__*er* schnell vorbeifahrende Zug._

Since _großen Lärm _is without an article and_ Lärm _ has no accusative marker, the accusative maker of the adjective is not redundant in this case but identifies _großen Lärm _as a direct object.


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## Aydintashar

I would like to re-examine the example that I already gave, and was corrected by Berndf:

1_-Ich möchte die mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden Gäste begrüßen.
_ 
The principal sentence in this case is:

2_-Ich möchte die Gäste begrüßen.
_ 
The accusative object in the above sentence is "_die Gäste_". We have plenty of words inserted in the middle of this accusative object, between the article and the noun. In fact, those are not mere words, but sentences, which contain their own internal structures. But, the insertion of these sentences in the middle of "_die Gäste_" does not cause the relationship between "_die_" and "_Gäste_" to become obscure, because there is a correspondence between them established with the help of gender and case. These two parts act as the two sides of a pair of parentheses, that safely contain a certain amount of text between themselves. The sentences which are contained within these pair of parentheses also have their internal structures, parts linked together that can be compared to "nested" parentheses. Those familiar with computer programming know how critical it is to  nest  parentheses correctly in the formulaes.  If they are not properly nested, the formula will produce either an error message, or completely false computational results.

If case endings are absent, we are asked to express a complex formula with nested sub-formulaes without using any parenthesis. The task is, therefore, rendered impossible. Thus, we are forced to give up the nesting method, and use a serial procedure, resulting in simple, consecutive sentences. This is what is happening in English. What German is able to express in morphological level, English has to express in syntactic space.
I think case category serves this purpose. Word order flexibility is not that much significant.


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## Forero

Istriano said:


> But you can always rephrase it:
> 
> _It is a lot of noise _(_*t*hat_)_ the fast traveling train makes..._


"It is" adds a clause, so I consider this a different sentence.





> Also, don't forget the famous song
> 
> *What a difference a day makes...*
> 
> where _day _is clearly the subject  forget it not


Yes, but if we say "What a difference makes a day", then _day_ becomes the object.


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## Forero

Aydintashar said:


> I would like to re-examine the example that I already gave, and was corrected by Berndf:
> 
> 1_-Ich möchte die mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden Gäste begrüßen._
> 
> The principal sentence in this case is:
> 
> 2_-Ich möchte die Gäste begrüßen._
> 
> The accusative object in the above sentence is "_die Gäste_". We have plenty of words inserted in the middle of this accusative object, between the article and the noun. In fact, those are not mere words, but sentences, which contain their own internal structures. But, the insertion of these sentences in the middle of "_die Gäste_" does not cause the relationship between "_die_" and "_Gäste_" to become obscure, because there is a correspondence between them established with the help of gender and case. These two parts act as the two sides of a pair of parentheses, that safely contain a certain amount of text between themselves. The sentences which are contained within these pair of parentheses also have their internal structures, parts linked together that can be compared to "nested" parentheses. Those familiar with computer programming know how critical it is to nest parentheses correctly in the formulaes. If they are not properly nested, the formula will produce either an error message, or completely false computational results.
> 
> If case endings are absent, we are asked to express a complex formula with nested sub-formulaes without using any parenthesis. The task is, therefore, rendered impossible. Thus, we are forced to give up the nesting method, and use a serial procedure, resulting in simple, consecutive sentences. This is what is happening in English. What German is able to express in morphological level, English has to express in syntactic space.
> I think case category serves this purpose. Word order flexibility is not that much significant.


As I see it, this would be just as possible without the case and gender endings. In fact this word order is understandable in English, albeit the tradition in English to put a long adjective phrase after the word it modifies.


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## Aydintashar

Istriano said:


> But you can always rephrase it:
> _
> It is a lot of noise what the fast traveling train makes..._
> 
> Also, don't forget the famous song
> 
> *What  difference a day makes...*
> 
> where _day _is clearly the subject  forget it not


The examples do not illustrate word order flexibility. Change of position in the example: "What a difference a day makes!" is due to the fact that it is an exclamation sentence. Change of position in inflected languages is more common, because the words carry the case endings, which act as their identity cards.


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## Istriano

SerboCroatian is a highly inflected language, but it's still not clear to tell subject and object in the cases like:

_Dijete voli janje.
Janje voli dijete.  

dijete = child, nominative and accusative
voli = loves
janje = lamb, nominative and accusative
_
Both nominative and accusative have exact the same form and you cannot say which is subject and which is object.

Similar case in German:

Ein Kind liebt ein Pferd.
Ein Pferd liebt ein Kind.

In Spanish, it's superclear:

_Un niño quiere un caballo._  (un niño = subject; un caballo = object).
_A un niño quiere un caballo. _(a un niño = object; un caballo = subject).
_Un caballo quiere a un niño_. (un caballo = subject; a un niño = object)
_Un caballo quiere un niño_. (un caballo = subject; un niño = object)

So, Spanish uses syntax (accusative a) to make the sentence clearer, and not morphology.
And, it has 4 choices of word order.


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## Aydintashar

Some linguists call the German capacity to build complex participal constructions as "Extended Attribute" (_Erweiterte Partizipialattribute_), and consider it a language used by the educated groups and in journalism. The interesting point is that through analysis of a vast amount of literature it has been made clear, that the tendency to use the "extended attribute feature", which was at a minimal level, began increasing in the 17th century, and reached a peak in the 19th century. It is mentioned, that German uses 3 different methods for assigning attributes, apart from the direct attributes: _Relativsätze, appositive Partizipiakonstruktionen_, and _erweiterte partizipialattribute_. Here is an academic review.


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## OBrasilo

In English, you can simply use the passive: _A lot of noise is made by the fast traveling train..._ No subordinate clause, and no weird sentence order. Just instead of relying on noun cases (like you would in German), you change the verb voice from active to passive when putting the subject second.


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## Schem

Aydintashar said:


> But, how can two close members of a group behave so differently, one of them behaving in a tough conservative way, the other in an absolutely flexible manner, to such an extent that it lost almost 90% of its inflectional suffixes and other grammatical features in a period of about a thousand years? *You may not notice such a big difference in behaviour in other closely linked languages such as French/Italian or Arabic/Hebrew.*



I'm probably not the best judge of this since I just started learning German but now that you brought up the example of Arabic and Hebrew, I actually think the relationship German has with English is within the normal range of variation within a single language family. Since I started learning modern Hebrew a while ago, I've been likening its status in relation to Arabic in the Semitic language family to that of German's relation with English. One is 'purer' with more complex grammar and a variety of inflections that the other doesn't have (i.e. Arabic/German) while the other is much simpler and has accumulated influence from a number of disparate sources (i.e. Hebrew/English). Considering the historic context in both cases, I don't think it's anything to be surprised about or to consider as being outside the range of normal variation.


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## sumelic

Schem, that's an interesting point. I feel like the analogy is weakened by the unique history of Modern Hebrew, though. It's a language that was no one's first language for a long time, and then underwent revival as part of a conscious movement to restore it to the place of a native language. It might be expected that it would show simplifications in grammar and reduced inflection.
English and German, on the other hand, are believed to have had continuous populations of native speakers back to the point where they first diverged.
The Semitic languages might still provide a good example in the various Arabic topolects that exist; I understand that they generally show some grammatical simplifications compared to Modern Standard Arabic, but that in writing, people are more conservative with grammar. This seems somewhat similar to the situation with Standard German, where there is a grammatically conservative written standard, with some simplification in many spoken varieties, and with many regional varieties of speech that have historically developed quite differently from the standard language.


----------



## Christo Tamarin

Bulgarian and Serbian are closely related languages. Moreover, there is a high degree of mutual intelligibility between them. And nevertheless, there is a big difference in grammar, perhaps bigger than in the English/German case.


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## Johnnyjohn

sumelic said:


> Schem, that's an interesting point. I feel like the analogy is weakened by the unique history of Modern Hebrew, though. It's a language that was no one's first language for a long time, and then underwent revival as part of a conscious movement to restore it to the place of a native language. It might be expected that it would show simplifications in grammar and reduced inflection.
> English and German, on the other hand, are believed to have had continuous populations of native speakers back to the point where they first diverged.
> The Semitic languages might still provide a good example in the various Arabic topolects that exist; I understand that they generally show some grammatical simplifications compared to Modern Standard Arabic, but that in writing, people are more conservative with grammar. This seems somewhat similar to the situation with Standard German, where there is a grammatically conservative written standard, with some simplification in many spoken varieties, and with many regional varieties of speech that have historically developed quite differently from the standard language.



Not a simplification from a norm, what the German dialects have turned into IS the norm in the world for grammatical complexity.


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## berndf

Johnnyjohn said:


> Not a simplification from a norm, what the German dialects have turned into IS the norm in the world for grammatical complexity.


He spoke of dialectal simplification *relative to *Modern Standard Arabic and *relative to *Standard German and that Modern Standard Arabic and Standard German preserve older morphological distinctions in the history of those specific languages. Do you have any problems with that statement?


----------



## Forero

sumelic said:


> ... that have historically developed quite differently from the standard language.



@Johnnyjohn: Did you read this as "developed from the standard language in different ways"?

I think he means "developed in ways different from the ways in which the standard language developed".

(To avoid this ambiguity succinctly, I would have said "developed quite differently than the standard language", but some people might call that ungrammatical.)


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## sumelic

Yes, that's what I meant. The "from" probably should have been a "than"; I would edit it, but I don't seem to be able to right now for some reason.


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## Ben Jamin

Aydintashar said:


> _Die seit fast zwei Jahren festgehaltenen kriegsgefangenen wurden endlich freigelassen.
> _
> 
> _The prisoners of war, who had been detained almost for two years were finally released._



For me the complexity of both sentences is virtually equal. For an ordinary English speaker the German sentence will be more complex, and vice versa.

The question which is more interesting is: in how many different ways can the words in the sentence be ordered without changing the meaning in a substantial way.


----------



## Ben Jamin

miguel89 said:


> English people had to underwent many upheavals throughout its history. There was, at first, the migration from the continent to the islands. In there they found other peoples with which they had to interact to some degree. Secondly, the Danish invasion. Thirdly and obviously, the Norman invasion. Norman was the language of the aristocracy for some time. Beside all of this, the internal struggles between kingdoms before the Norman invasion changed the center of prestige continuously. All these factors must have affected the language's evolution.



The Scandinavian langauges have not gone through the same historical upheavals as English did, but they simplified their morphology in almost the same degree as English did. The difference is related mostly to morphology of adjectives which is slightly more complex, but the verbal system is even simpler.
So the theory of undergoing many upheavals throughout history is not a good explanation for the simplifying process.


----------



## luitzen

I think German is the exception, not English. German is much more archaic than other Germanic influence. English fits in quite well, especially considering that it has been influenced by an even more analytic language (Norse) and due to the Norman conquest also a language quite different from English.

A better question would be why Icelandic and Faroese are so archaic while Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are not.

Also, in the example sentences I saw in the thread, the complexity is not made possible by case endings, but by finite and continuous verb forms. Of course this may lead to quite weird sentences in English, but the same is true for the German examples given.

I translated the examples given in this thread to West-Frisian, a language even more closely related to English than Dutch. Like Dutch, West-Frisian lacks any case system.

_Die seit fast zwei Jahren festgehaltenen kriegsgefangenen wurden endlich freigelassen.
_De sûnt krap twa jier fêstholden kriichsfinzen wurde lang om let freilitten.

Ich möchte *die mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden Gäste begrüßen*
Ik soe de mei de ynkoarten publyk beskikber stelde trein oankommende gasten begroetsje wolle.

_- Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk.
_In troch haadlingen keazen kening regearret it folk.
_- Der schnell vorbeifahrende Zug machte großen Lärm.
_De fluch foarbyraazjende trein makket in soad bombaarje._
- Das ist ein schon in Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept.
_Dat is in al sûnt de Midsieuwen yn brûk wêzend resept.

I have a feeling that in West-Frisian the given examples become a bit better understandable and more normal than in German because West-Frisian doesn't have cases and case markers to confuse things even more.

Furthermore, it think that the assertion that all languages have cases even when they don't have case markers is not true at all. When we talk about Dutch grammar, we talk about onderwerp (subject), meewerkend voorwerp ("cooperating object") and lijdend voorwerp ("undergoing object") while the terms nominativus, dativus and accusativus are used when we're talking about German grammar. This is precisely because these things don't work in the same way as cases. This becomes obvious when you study situation in which traces of cases are still left behind.

Dativus: _Ik geef *hun* het boek. _- I give (to) them the book.
Meewerkend voorwerp: _Ik geef het boek aan *hen*._ - I give the book to them.


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## berndf

luitzen said:


> I have a feeling that in West-Frisian the given examples become a bit better understandable and more normal than in German because West-Frisian doesn't have cases and case markers to confuse things even more.


What is easier to understand and what is more difficult to understand depends on what you are used to and isn't an objective property of the sentence. I fail to see your point here.


----------



## Ancana

"Ich möchte *die* mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden Gäste begrüßen"

Would someone be so kind as to explain the meaning of the above sentence to me? I really don't understand it. I can not believe that a german natural speaker should have produced such a nonsense.


----------



## luitzen

berndf said:


> What is easier to understand and what is more difficult to understand depends on what you are used to and isn't an objective property of the sentence. I fail to see your point here.


You're right. I assumed it might be easier because in West-Frisian you sometimes don't need the article as it doesn't mark case anyway. I realised I made a mistake, but in the next sentence you don't need an article after _út_:

_Ein von den Patriziern gewählter König regiert das Volk.
In út haadlingen keazen kening regearret it folk._


----------



## berndf

In the German sentence you don't need the article either.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

Istriano said:


> English is no isolated case. Why is French grammar so different than the Italian one (Pronoun subjects obligatory in French, _gerund absent in French_).



Beg your pardon?

Il entra en fredonnant. -> gérondif
Les élèves faisant des erreurs seront punis. -> participe présent

There was a time when pronoun subjects were not obligatory in French. This changed only in the 17th century: the obnoxious influence of the Académie Française.



Istriano said:


> Macedonian vs Russian: Macedonian has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax



Sure? I mean, I've got no means to compare to, but isn't it that Macedonian, like Bulgarian, has a verbal morphology that is more complicated than verbal morphology in most of the Slavic languages?



Ancana said:


> "Ich möchte *die* mit dem in Kürze zur Verfügung der Öffentlichkeit zu stellenden Zug zu erreichenden Gäste begrüßen"
> 
> Would someone be so kind as to explain the meaning of the above sentence to me? I really don't understand it. I can not believe that a german natural speaker should have produced such a nonsense.



It should be "Ich möchte die mit dem [in Kürze der Öffentlichkeit zur Verfügung zu stellenden] Zug eintreffenden/ankommenden Gäste begrüßen".
And no, it wasn't a native German speaker who produced that sentence.


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## berndf

You can blame the AF for a lot of things but I don't think for that. Null subject pronouns were an archaism already at that time.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

Probably you're right. I only remembered reading fragments of an edict by one of the two kings who went by the name of Francis, probably Francis II, and there was an example of the pluralis majestatis without the subject pronoun. I've just browsed an anthology of French poetry and already in the poems of the Pléiade the subject pronoun is seldom omitted.


----------



## Peripes

Angelo di fuoco said:


> Il entra en fredonnant. -> gérondif
> Les élèves faisant des erreurs seront punis. -> participe présent



I think the second sentence is incorrect.
_
Les élèves qui font des erreurs seront punis._

Progressive is denoted with other constructions. The gerund is mainly used to say that two actions happened at the same time, as in the first example.

Sorry for deviating from the main topic.

I think that in some way every language has a way to indicate cases, just that some of them replace it with analytic constructions.


----------



## Angelo di fuoco

Peripes said:


> I think the second sentence is incorrect.
> _
> Les élèves qui font des erreurs seront punis._
> 
> Progressive is denoted with other constructions. The gerund is mainly used to say that two actions happened at the same time, as in the first example.



For the sake of clarity, please use French terms for grammatical phenomena of the French language.
The difference between "qui font" and "faisant" is only in style: "qui font" is everyday language, "faisant" is used mainly in writing. Otherwise "faisant" is a perfect substitute for "qui font".


----------



## djwebb1969

Istriano said:


> How many tenses does contemporary spoken German have, only two: present and perfect  I wouldn't call it a rich system.
> Even future tense is rarely used in speech and simple past is used only with a handful of verbs.
> 
> In English,
> _I will do it
> I'm going to do it
> I will be doing it...
> 
> I am doing it
> I do it...
> 
> I have done it
> I've been doing it.
> 
> I did it
> I was doing it.
> 
> I had done it
> I had been doing it...
> _
> All are used in speech.
> 
> Colloquial English has subtle nuances absent from German. Old German had a verbal system similar to the English one (_It has rained = Es hat geregnet _different than _It rained = Es regnete_)
> but it has been reduced to a small number of tenses.
> Also, English is very gerund friendly: _My going away has nothing to do with her moving in._



Some of this relates to the presumed Celtic or pre-Celtic substratum that underlies English. The English gerund corresponds to the Irish Gaelic verbal noun .


----------



## berndf

The English gerund has always existed and it also exists in German. The difference is that it has been _grammaticalized_ in English. This happened in Middle English; much to late to have anything to do with Celtic Substratum.


----------



## djwebb1969

berndf said:


> The English gerund has always existed and it also exists in German. The difference is that it has been _grammaticalized_ in English. This happened in Middle English; much to late to have anything to do with Celtic Substratum.



That is in no sense a refutation of what I said. See https://andrsei.wordpress.com/2010/...d-to-english-examining-the-celtic-hypothesis/ for a discussion of the "Celtic hypothesis":



> English is the only Germanic language to have developed in a place where  the native languages use the progressive as their base present tense,  and English is the only Germanic language to use its verbal-noun as its  only truly present tense.


----------



## berndf

The progressive form has nothing to do with the gerund. It is constructed with the present participle. I contest the statement that English is the only Germanic language with a progressive form. It is just the only language where it has been standardized. In German dialects that have it, it just happened to remain a dialectal feature.


----------



## M Mira

berndf said:


> The progressive form has nothing to do with the gerund. It is constructed with the present participle.


Could you provide a few examples of "be + present participle" instead of "be + gerund" formation in Middle English before they merged? Because in Charles Barber's "The English language: a historical introduction", page 163, he stated that:
 "… and we arrived at the modern sentence _he was reading. _Originally this _reading_ was not part of the verb, but was a noun (OE _rǣding_), meaning 'the act of reading'. Many nouns of this kind originally ended in _-ung_, like OE _leornung_ 'learning', but this changed to _-ing_ in Middle English."


----------



## berndf

M Mira said:


> Could you provide a few examples of "be + present participle" instead of "be + gerund" formation in Middle English before they merged? Because in Charles Barber's "The English language: a historical introduction", page 163, he stated that:
> "… and we arrived at the modern sentence _he was reading. _Originally this _reading_ was not part of the verb, but was a noun (OE _rǣding_), meaning 'the act of reading'. Many nouns of this kind originally ended in _-ung_, like OE _leornung_ 'learning', but this changed to _-ing_ in Middle English."


You mean the explanation that _he is reading _developed from _he is on reading > he is areading > he is reading_? I am not quite buying it. But OK, it is a respectable theory and should be taken seriously. Mea culpa.

But it doesn't matter for the discussion here because if this theory is true then this would weaken the Celtic origin theory even more, because there is an analogous form in dialectal German: _Ich bin am Lesen_. The only difference is that it doesn't use the _-ung _form but the infinitive as a verbal noun which serves the same purpose as the gerund in Middle and Modern English. Old English on the other hand also used the infinitive as an abstract noun to express an action.


----------



## luitzen

M Mira said:


> Could you provide a few examples of "be + present participle" instead of "be + gerund" formation in Middle English before they merged? Because in Charles Barber's "The English language: a historical introduction", page 163, he stated that:
> "… and we arrived at the modern sentence _he was reading. _Originally this _reading_ was not part of the verb, but was a noun (OE _rǣding_), meaning 'the act of reading'. Many nouns of this kind originally ended in _-ung_, like OE _leornung_ 'learning', but this changed to _-ing_ in Middle English."


According to Wikipedia:

Old English present participles were marked with an ending in _-ende (or -iende for verbs whose infinitives ended in -ian). In Middle English, various forms were used in different regions: -ende (southwest, southeast, Midlands), -inde (southwest, southeast), -and (north), -inge (southeast). The last is the one that became standard, falling together with the suffix -ing used to form verbal nouns. _(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle#English)

Or in other words, in English it is not "be + gerund", but "be + present participle" and it's always been the case. It's just that in some dialects the gerund and present participle looked the same.


----------



## berndf

luitzen said:


> According to Wikipedia:
> 
> Old English present participles were marked with an ending in _-ende (or -iende for verbs whose infinitives ended in -ian). In Middle English, various forms were used in different regions: -ende (southwest, southeast, Midlands), -inde (southwest, southeast), -and (north), -inge (southeast). The last is the one that became standard, falling together with the suffix -ing used to form verbal nouns. _(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participle#English)
> 
> Or in other words, in English it is not "be + gerund", but "be + present participle" and it's always been the case. It's just that in some dialects the gerund and present participle looked the same.


M Mira is right. There is a plausible way how _be_ + _ing_-form can have developed out of the gerund rather than out of the participle (see #82). It cannot be readily dismissed.


----------



## berndf

M Mira said:


> Could you provide a few examples of "be + present participle" instead of "be + gerund" formation in Middle English before they merged? Because in Charles Barber's "The English language: a historical introduction", page 163, he stated that:
> "… and we arrived at the modern sentence _he was reading. _Originally this _reading_ was not part of the verb, but was a noun (OE _rǣding_), meaning 'the act of reading'. Many nouns of this kind originally ended in _-ung_, like OE _leornung_ 'learning', but this changed to _-ing_ in Middle English."


I have found an example with the original participle ending _-nd_ in ME where I think the progressive meaning is quite clear. Chapter two of Egerton version of Mandeville's travels (written around 1400), second paragraph:
_Of þise foure maner of treesz þe Iews made Cristes crosse for þai trowed þat *he schuld hafe bene hingand* apon þat crosse als lang as þat crosse myght last. (Of these four kinds of trees the Jews made Christ's cross for they found that he should have been hanging upon that cross as long as that cross might last.)_
(online text)

That's why I said I don't buy that theory. But I may be wrong.


----------



## luitzen

berndf said:


> M Mira is right. There is a plausible way how _be_ + _ing_-form can have developed out of the gerund rather than out of the participle (see #82). It cannot be readily dismissed.


I'm no linguist, but I assume linguists have thought about this and considered both options. They rejected one option and the other ended up in Wikipedia.


----------



## Gavril

luitzen said:


> Old English present participles were marked with an ending in _-ende (or -iende for verbs whose infinitives ended in -ian). In Middle English, various forms were used in different regions: -ende (southwest, southeast, Midlands), -inde (southwest, southeast), -and (north), -inge (southeast). The last is the one that became standard, falling together with the suffix -ing used to form verbal nouns. _



How did the southeastern form -_inge_ come about in the first place, if not through the influence of the gerund in -_ing_? There is no general sound change of -_nd_- > -_ng_- in English, especially not in the middle of a syllable (maybe such a change occurred in the southeastern ME dialects, but are there any examples of this change other than the participial ending?).


----------



## djwebb1969

Berndf has explained that sentences like "he is reading" were unknown in Old English and didn't develop out of "areading". So - and I don't know the answer, which is why I'm asking - when is the earliest occurrence of such constructions attested?


----------



## berndf

Gavril said:


> How did the southeastern form -_inge_ come about in the first place, if not through the influence of the gerund in -_ing_? There is no general sound change of -_nd_- > -_ng_- in English, especially not in the middle of a syllable (maybe such a change occurred in the southeastern ME dialects, but are there any examples of this change other than the participial ending?).


We don't know. It may be a phonetic change or a scribal confusion or a combination of both. Many theories have been proposed. E.g., there is evidence of "g-dropping" already in some ME dialects. It may be that southern _-inde_ and _-ing_ had merged to _-in'_ in some dialects and _-inge_ is a scribal confusion. But this is only one of many theories.


----------



## berndf

djwebb1969 said:


> Berndf has explained that sentences like "he is reading" were unknown in Old English and didn't develop out of "areading". So - and I don't know the answer, which is why I'm asking - when is the earliest occurrence of such constructions attested?


I am not quite sure I understand the question correctly. What I am saying is that sentences like _he is rǣdende_ did exist is *OE *but as far as I know a progressive meaning cannot be established. I gave an example that of a *ME* sentence with obviously progressive meaning with the _-nd-_ for, i.e. a form that is unambiguously a participle and not a gerund:





berndf said:


> _Of þise foure maner of treesz þe Iews made Cristes crosse for þai trowed þat *he schuld hafe bene hingand* apon þat crosse als lang as þat crosse myght last._



On the other hand I have acknowledged that the theory _he is reading_ being derived from _he is on reding_[gerund] is serious. I just said "I don't buy it". Examples for such a form with an obvious progressive meaning exist, e.g., _16d. Itm for Wyne on palm sonday whyle the passyon *was on redyng*_ (source).

There are paradigms for both. I have my own idea. But I have accepted that both theories are serious candidates and that my original unconditional dismissal





berndf said:


> The progressive form has nothing to do with the gerund.


is not tenable.


----------



## Forero

For what it's worth—

In my experience, all native English speakers today who distinguish present participles from gerunds by pronunciation (e.g. [ɪn] or [n̩] (syllabic _n_) for the participle and [iŋ] or [ɪi̯ŋ] for the gerund, or _a-_ for the participle with no prefix for the gerund) will use their participle form for progressive tenses but only their gerund form as a verbal noun.

There are of course speakers who make this distinction in colloquial speech but use only the spelling pronunciation (sounds like a gerund) for formal situations, as well as speakers who do not make a distinction at all.

So it may well be that the _a-_ prefix came to be as a device to distinguish a participle from a gerund when their respective suffixes got conflated.





berndf said:


> On the other hand I have acknowledged that the theory _he is reading_ being derived from _he is on reding_[gerund] is serious. I just said "I don't buy it". Examples for such a form with an obvious progressive meaning exist, e.g., _16d. Itm for Wyne on palm sonday whyle the passyon *was on redyng*_ (source).


In fact, this example is not so obviously progressive as it is passive (= "was being read" / "was read").


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## berndf

True. It is not that obvious.

I cannot judge how much substance there is to the phonetic distinction between participle and gerund in AmE. In BrE I would be very sceptical. In my experience, speakers find it difficult to maintain the distinction conceptually and some grammarians argue that the distinction should be abandoned.


----------



## Sibutlasi

It is surely a bit pretentious of me to try to contribute as late as this to a thread in which so much has already been said, but my impression is that the issue must be approached from a rather more abstract perspective than the presence/absence of inflections or grammatical gender.

As to the former, nothing much would change if German suddenly became as inflectionally impoverished as English. Since both languages require explicit subjects, verbal number and agreement inflections are arguably redundant in both; English has simply gone further and dispensed with all but the -s of 3rd. p. sg. present tenses, but it might just as well have dropped that too (and German could perfectly well have dropped all its agreement inflections without by any means endangering communication). Something similar can be said about mood inflections: German has preserved more than English in this area, but in most cases the need for conjunctions that, following the relevant verbs, mark the modal status of subordinate clauses makes the mood inflections redundant. And nothing would happen if German suddenly dispensed with its NP-internal agreement in gender, number and case; the number distinction would have to be expressed somewhere in every NP, but just once; even English is redundant in this respect: nothing would really be lost if, say, only nouns (or only determiners) carried the necessary number distinction. ‘Copying’ number onto the verb is perfectly otiose, as well: the number of events referred to could easily be inferred from the number of subjects, anyway. As to grammatical gender, it suffices to look at languages like English or Mandarin to realize that it is simply a remnant of a primitive stage in which the lexicon still functioned as an aggregate of idiomatic resources of multiple origins that had not yet been systematized according to the needs of an efficient syntax.

My point, in short, is that the differences between German and English, in this respect, are rather marginal, and the fact that English has lost much more of the Early Germanic inflectional system than German has (for reasons sufficiently explained in earlier contributions to this thread) does not make the two languages so much different from each other, after all. Only the persistence in German of a richer case inflection than survives in English can be said to be a significant factor for the existence of one of the really important syntactic differences between the two languages, i.e., the great rigidity of the SVO word order of English versus the great versatility of the German Vorfeld, where dative/accusative/genitive NPs, adverbials, PPs, APs, VPs (including participles) and CPs can freely appear before the finite verb. But, even in this respect, the difference is not that great, because, after all, English also allows non-detached pre-verbal non-subjects in ‘marked’ constructions.

In my view, the *one* really important difference between English and German is that whereas English is consistently Head < Complement (i.e., the head precedes its complements in ALL phrases, VPs, AuxPs, NPs, PPs, APs, QPs, the few AdvPs that contain complements, and CPs), German is a ‘mixed’ language in this respect: it is head-initial in CPs, most PPs, predicative APs, and NPs, but still strongly head-final in all VPs and prenominal APs and participles. You might object that finite verbs and auxiliaries do precede their complements in main clauses, but the V-2nd property of German main clauses is best treated as a derived surface phenomenon, as proved by the fact that even finite verbs and auxiliaries must occupy VP-final slots in subordinate clauses; everything becomes much more regular and easy to state if finite verbs (and auxiliaries) underlyingly occupy VP-final position and ‘raise’ into the V-2nd slot at surface structure. As to the fact that verbs cannot follow clausal complements, even in subordinate clauses, it should not count in this respect, because complement clauses are not merely post-verbal, they are ‘extraposed’ and usually leave ‘heralding’ proforms like _es_ or _da _(+Preposition) before the main verb. 

A second, minor, but still relatively important difference is that whereas German has ‘generalized V-Raising’ (and so generalized ‘inversion’ effects), in English only auxiliaries ‘raise’ from Tense to higher heads (Focus, Force) and cause such inversion effects.

The rest largely follows. Although, on the surface, both English and German are ‘mixed’ languages in what concerns the Modifier < Head vs. Head < Modifier parameter, the real difference is that, in German, as a consequence of its head-final-ness, modifiers that precede their nominal heads (APs, Participial Clauses) can take their own complements and modifiers *on their left*, whereas in English, being head-initial, that is out of the question. Since that includes PPs which are themselves head-initial (the complement of the preposition must follow it), German allows right-branching PP modifiers of adjectives, participles and verbs to precede their heads, whereas in English PP modifiers are just as impossible before verbs, participles or adjectives as they are before nouns (due to what has traditionally been called the Head-Final Filter). Thus, virtually all the massive word-order differences that exist between German and English are consequences of the fact that the most important constructions of German have remained head-final.
To the extent that is correct, you might as well have formulated your question more sharply as follows: why did German remain partially head-final (for very important constructions, especially VPs), while English (and most other European IE languages) became consistently head-initial?

I have almost nothing original to say about the first part of the question (although see below), but it seems to me that as regards why English became head-initial the traditional answer is likely to be basically correct: even before the Norman Conquest, English had come into contact with varieties of Northern Germanic and spoken Latin that were already head-initial (and SVO) due to the erosion of their respective inflectional systems and the need to fix constituent order, and, of course, the Norman Conquest automatically boosted that trend by bringing English into contact with a substantial foreign population that enjoyed great social prestige and happened to speak a kind of ‘French’ that was itself already head-initial and primarily SVO (for the same reason: the erosion of its inflectional system). By comparison, German remained freer from the influence of head-initial languages than English and also could not but preserve its case  system relatively intact to support its traditional SOV and V2 syntax. It is true that the spoken ‘low-Latin’ that the German-speaking population could hear the monks speak was also largely head-initial from the earlier Middle Ages, but, of course, only a tiny fraction of the German-speaking population was likely to be affected, the German-speaking area never suffered a large-scale invasion by a foreign population and was never forced to repress its native tongue and learn a foreign one. The old Germanic head-final and V2 patterns, therefore, with the supporting inflectional system still largely in place, could remain in use throughout the Middle Ages only to be reinforced by literary models of head-final Latin when the Renaissance popularized among the learned the great writers of the golden Roman era, and what was prestigious among the few during the Renaissance simply remained prestigious when the many eventually gained access to literacy later, not to mention the fact that the many had never stopped speaking ‘German’ and that the influence of Latin actually decayed in the German speaking area after the great schism between Roman Catholics and Lutherans.

Obviously, the head-initial tendency of *all* neighboring languages must have influenced the development of spoken German, too, otherwise it would not have become as ‘mixed’ a language as it is nowadays word-order-wise, but during the crucial Late Middle Ages the situation of German was objectively much more supportive of conservativism than that of English. 

Needless to say, this is just a very broad picture, and there is nothing ‘mine’ in it, but it makes sense, and, as far as I know, nobody has ever proposed an alternative explanation of ‘why’ German is so syntactically ‘conservative’ of Early Germanic word-order in comparison with English.

S.


----------



## djwebb1969

berndf said:


> True. It is not that obvious.
> 
> I cannot judge how much substance there is to the phonetic distinction between participle and gerund in AmE. In BrE I would be very sceptical. In my experience, speakers find it difficult to maintain the distinction conceptually and some grammarians argue that the distinction should be abandoned.



I agree. If you look at "reading is my favourite pastime", you could pronounce that readin'. To argue that native speakers analyse the sentence first would be a little demanding. Maybe in things like Being and Time, a book by Heidegger, you would tend to pronounce it -ing because the whole phrase sounds odd...


----------



## berndf

Sibutlasi said:


> Needless to say, this is just a very broad picture, and there is nothing ‘mine’ in it, but it makes sense, and, as far as I know, nobody has ever proposed an alternative explanation of ‘why’ German is so syntactically ‘conservative’ of Early Germanic word-order in comparison with English.


I still have difficulties to see why we are in need of one. In what you wrote I accept that the syntactical differences are often exaggerated. But I haven't seen anything that would shake the view that word order and inflection system correlate. The more syntactic function is marked by the inflection system the freer a language is to use word order to express other things. As I perceive it, the main function of word order variation in German is emphasis variation.


----------



## Sibutlasi

berndf said:


> I still have difficulties to see why we are in need of one. In what you wrote I accept that the syntactical differences are often exaggerated. But I haven't seen anything that would shake the view that word order and inflection system correlate. The more syntactic function is marked by the inflection system the freer a language is to use word order to express other things. As I perceive it, the main function of word order variation in German is emphasis variation.



Well, having a real explanation would not do us any harm, but I entirely agree with everything else you say. I'm not aware of having said or implied the contrary in my earlier post.

Cheers,

S.


----------



## pikunsia

Istriano said:


> English still has genders, but they are natural, just like in Dravidian languages and unlike IndoAryan languages,  man is always masculine, girl is always feminine, a book is neutral.
> Don't you think it's kind of bizarre that _girl _is neutral in German (_das Mädchen_) and even the wife used to be neutral (_das Weib_).
> 
> The only remnant of that usage very akin to contemporary German is the feminine nature of the word ship:   _Titanic was a nice ship. Everyone was so sad when she sank.
> 
> _English is no isolated case. Why is French grammar so different than the Italian one (Pronoun subjects obligatory in French, gerund absent in French).
> Why is Malayalam grammar so different than the grammar of other Dravidian languages (Verbs don't have inflections of person).
> 
> Why Macedonian and Bulgarian are so different than the other Slavic languages, there are no declension, but there are articles!
> 
> Macedonian and Serbian are almost as distant grammatically as German and English!
> 
> 
> 
> English has always been an absorbing language, almost like a sponge:
> 
> 1. it is one of the richest languages when it comes to vocabulary, for almost every word there are many perfect synonyms of different origin (Germanic vs Latin):
> _freedom _or _liberty_, _feeling _or _emotion  _and so on
> (the only similar language is Malayalam which has one word of Dravidian origin and one of Sanskrit origin for almost everything
> and unlike differences in Hindi which are artificially made, all speakers of Malayalam are fine with both words, for example:
> water is _jelam _or _vellam_; the Moon is _tingel _or _chandre _)
> 
> 2. as English morphology was simplified, its syntax got more complicated
> 
> English vs German: English has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax
> Macedonian vs Russian: Macedonian has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax
> Cape Verdean creole vs Portuguese: Cape Verdean has simplified morphology, but much more complicate syntax
> 
> The difference between Creoles and English (or Macedonian) is that the
> grammar of English has not been borrowed from another language (unlike in Cabo Verdean creole which borrowed its syntax from local African languages),
> simplification of morphology and gradual ''complication'' of syntax was a completely internal process.



<The only remnant of that usage very akin to contemporary German is the feminine nature of the word ship:   _Titanic was a nice ship. Everyone was so sad when she sank.>

Why the word ``ship'' should be feminine?  Indeed this fact is contra-nature since famous Nordic navigation was made for men not for women. In Spanish and a lot of other Indo-European languages ``ship'' is clearly masculine. I don't doubt about your claiming, however I can wonder what's  the historic reason  the word __``ship'' be  of feminine genus __in English and German._


----------



## djwebb1969

pikunsia said:


> _ Why the word ``ship'' should be feminine?  Indeed this fact is contra-nature since famous Nordic navigation was made for men not for women. In Spanish and a lot of other Indo-European languages ``ship'' is clearly masculine. I don't doubt about your claiming, however I can wonder what's  the historic reason  the word __``ship'' be  of feminine genus __in English and German._



*Recte: why should the word "ship" be feminine?

Because a captain controls a ship just like a man controls a woman. Sailing is, in many ways, like sex.


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## Waldgänger

Ben Jamin said:


> The question which is more interesting is: in how many different ways can the words in the sentence be ordered without changing the meaning in a substantial way.



One of the main differences between English and German is the larger freedom of word order in German. This freedom is in part based on the presence of case endings in German, which help to identify the function within a sentence. However, nothing is absolute; there are many examples where case endings are not sufficient to mark the function (e.g. for feminine or neutral words in the nominative and accusative cases). Still, when writing English texts, I notice the stricter word order, which together with my limited knowledge of English makes it more difficult for me to write elegant prose. 


Consider this sentence:

_To his great joy, I returned the book to him yesterday._ 


That would leave us in German with many possible variations: 


_1. Zu seiner großen Freude habe ich ihm das Buch gestern zurückgegeben.
*To his great joy have I him the book yesterday returned. _

_2. Zu seiner großen Freude habe ich ihm gestern das Buch zurückgegeben.
*To his great joy have I him yesterday the book returned. _

_3. Ich habe ihm gestern zu seiner großen Freude das Buch zurückgegeben.
*I have him yesterday to his great joy the book returned. _

_4. Ich habe ihm gestern das Buch zu seiner großen Freude zurückgegeben.
*I have him yesterday the book to his great joy returned. _

_5. Ich habe ihm das Buch zu seiner großen Freude gestern zurückgegeben.
*I have him the book to his great joy yesterday returned. _

_6. Ich habe ihm das Buch gestern zu seiner großen Freude zurückgegeben.
*I have him the book yesterday to his great joy returned. _

_7. Das Buch habe ich ihm zu seiner großen Freude gestern zurückgegeben.
*The book have I him to his great joy yesterday returned. _

_8. Das Buch habe ich ihm gestern zu seiner großen Freude zurückgegeben.
*The book have I him yesterday to his great joy returned. _


All these sentences are completely normal in both written and spoken German. There are even more possibilities that could be used under special circumstances:


_9. Zurückgegeben habe ich ihm das Buch gestern zu seiner großen Freude.
*Returned have I him the book yesterday to his great joy. _

_10. Zurückgegeben habe ich ihm das Buch zu seiner großen Freude gestern.
*Returned have I him the book to his great joy yesterday.  _

_11. Zurückgegeben habe ich ihm gestern zu seiner großen Freude das Buch.
*Returned have I him yesterday to his great joy the book. _


In principle, it is also possible to loosen the _Satzklammer_ (which is getting more and more common in spoken language): 

_12. Das Buch habe ich ihm gestern zurückgegeben zu seiner großen Freude.
*The book have I him yesterday returned to his great joy. _


_13. Ich habe ihm das Buch gestern zurückgegeben zu seiner großen Freude.
*I have him the book yesterday returned to his great joy._


If we increase the complexity of the sentence, I (as a non-native speaker) have the impression that the English version sounds a little bit clumsy:

_To his great joy, I returned the book to him in the library yesterday._


In contrast, in German the sentence sounds quite normal: 

_Ich habe ihm das Buch gestern zu seiner großen Freude in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben. 
*I have him the book yesterday to his great joy in the library returned_


Of course, the word order can be varied even in such a complex sentence. Each choice of word order will modify the meaning a little bit, putting emphasis on the book, on the other person, on the act of returning something, on the time when it happened, and so on. Here some examples:

_Ich habe ihm das Buch zu seiner großen Freude gestern in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben. 
Das Buch habe ich ihm gestern zu seiner großen Freude in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben.
Ihm habe ich das Buch gestern zu seiner großen Freude in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben.
Ihm habe ich das Buch zu seiner großen Freude gestern in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben.
Zu seiner großen Freude habe ich ihm das Buch gestern in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben. 
Zu seiner großen Freude habe ich ihm gestern das Buch in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben. 
Zu seiner großen Freude habe ich ihm in der Bibliothek das Buch gestern zurückgegeben. 
Zu seiner großen Freude habe ich ihm in der Bibliothek gestern das Buch zurückgegeben. 
Gestern habe ich ihm das Buch zu seiner großen Freude in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben. 
Gestern habe ich ihm in der Bibliothek das Buch zu seiner großen Freude zurückgegeben. 
Gestern habe ich ihm zu seiner großen Freude das Buch in der Bibliothek zurückgegeben. 
Gestern habe ich ihm zu seiner großen Freude in der Bibliothek das Buch zurückgegeben. 
Zurückgegeben habe ich ihm das Buch gestern zu seiner großen Freude in der Bibliothek.
Zurückgegeben habe ich ihm gestern in der Bibliothek zu seiner großen Freude das Buch. 
In der Bibliothek habe ich ihm das Buch gestern zu seiner großen Freude zurückgegeben. 
In der Bibliothek habe ich ihm das Buch zu seiner großen Freude gestern zurückgegeben. 
In der Bibliothek habe ich ihm zu seiner großen Freude das Buch gestern zurückgegeben. _


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## Ben Jamin

To # 98
Thank you for your elaborate explanation! My knowledge of German is superficial, and I didn't know that there is sucha big freedom of word order.
It even matches the freedom of word order in Slavic languages. That explaines something that I noticed som time ago: translations of poetry from Slavic languages sound much better in German than in English. The German translations reproduce the euphony of the original poems much better than the English ones.


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## Waldgänger

Ben Jamin said:


> To # 98
> Thank you for your elaborate explanation! My knowledge of German is superficial, and I didn't know that there is sucha big freedom of word order.
> It even matches the freedom of word order in Slavic languages. That explaines something that I noticed som time ago: translations of poetry from Slavic languages sound much better in German than in English. The German translations reproduce the euphony of the original poems much better than the English ones.



I think that each language has its specific strengths. The freedom of word order is one of the aspects that I miss in English; probably you do as well based on the characteristics of your native language. Polish probably has much better preserved case endings and thus may allow a lot of freedom as well.

On the other hand, freedom in German is not unlimited. For example, the finite verb - in my example: _habe_ - has to be always in second position. There are some other peculiarities of German that can make it more difficult to arrange more complex constructions, e.g. participle constructions.

Consider for example this participle construction in English, which was brought as an example by another poster in this thread:

_This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages._

In German, the word order is different:
_
Das ist ein schon im Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept. 
*That is an already in the Middle Ages used recipe. _

So far, so good. However, if the phrase becomes more complicated, the word order in English appears to be more easy to handle:

_This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages by Catalonian cooks on castles in Southern France._

_Das ist ein schon im Mittelalter von katalonischen Köchen auf Burgen in Südfrankreich verwendetes Rezept. 
*That is an already in the Middle Ages by Catalonian cooks on castles in Southern France used recipe. 
_
This sentence is still possible as written, but you may notice the problem that may occur when additional modifiers are added:

_This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages by Catalonian cooks on castles in Southern France, which at that time constituted one of the most advanced regions in Europe._

_Das ist ein schon im Mittelalter von katalonischen Köchen auf Burgen in Südfrankreich, das zu jener Zeit eine der fortschrittlichsten Regionen in Europa darstellte, verwendetes Rezept.
*That is an already in the Middle Ages by Catalonian cooks on castles in Southern France, which at that time one of the most advanced regions in Europe constituted, used recipe. 
_
I don't say that such a sentence is not possible; actually, Thomas Mann elegantly used such sentences in his works. However, in spoken speech, such constructions tend to overstrain the short-time memory, since both the speaker and the listener have to recollect how the sentence started.


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## Ben Jamin

Waldgänger said:


> _
> Das ist ein schon im Mittelalter verwendetes Rezept.
> *That is an already in the Middle Ages used recipe. _
> 
> ....
> 
> This sentence is still possible as written, but you may notice the problem that may occur when additional modifiers are added:
> 
> _This is a recipe already used in the Middle Ages by Catalonian cooks on castles in Southern France, which at that time constituted one of the most advanced regions in Europe._
> 
> _Das ist ein schon im Mittelalter von katalonischen Köchen auf Burgen in Südfrankreich, das zu jener Zeit eine der fortschrittlichsten Regionen in Europa darstellte, verwendetes Rezept.
> *That is an already in the Middle Ages by Catalonian cooks on castles in Southern France, which at that time one of the most advanced regions in Europe constituted, used recipe. _


But is this the obligatory word order, or is it possible to place the final clause somewher at the beginning of the sentence?


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## Hector9

I'm very curious as to whether the differences in grammar between English vs German are bigger than those between Spanish vs French (the former couple being the furthest and less intelligible among the romance branch, Romanian aside)

@Peterdg I recall you can speak all these languages, do you have any idea of this?


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## Red Arrow

luitzen said:


> A better question would be why Icelandic and Faroese are so archaic while Norwegian, Swedish and Danish are not.


Dutch dialects spoken in the Netherlands are often a lot more simplified than those in Flanders. This is apparantly because (in the past) Flanders definitely wasn't the place to go. (And those who _did_ migrate to Flanders often didn't bother learning our language, but rather kept speaking French) The 'immigrants' are often the ones who simplifly. Native speakers also simplify their language, but often not as much if there are no immigrants.

More people went to Norway, Sweden and Denmark than to Iceland and the Faroese islands, so Norwegian, Danish and Swedish got simplified whereas Icelandic and Faroese kept most/all morphological features.

Just look at the (almost) complete absence of dialects in Iceland.

I think that German dialects are easier in areas with (more) historical importance.


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## Hector9

Red Arrow :D said:


> Dutch dialects spoken in the Netherlands are often a lot more simplified than those in Flanders. This is apparantly because (in the past) Flanders definitely wasn't the place to go. (And those who _did_ migrate to Flanders often didn't bother learning our language, but rather kept speaking French) The 'immigrants' are often the ones who simplifly. Native speakers also simplify their language, but often not as much if there are no immigrants.
> 
> More people went to Norway, Sweden and Denmark than to Iceland and the Faroese islands, so Norwegian, Danish and Swedish got simplified whereas Icelandic and Faroese kept most/all morphological features.
> 
> Just look at the (almost) complete absence of dialects in Iceland.
> 
> I think that German dialects are easier in areas with (more) historical importance.



But if the simplification of a language is due to the numbers of immigrants, then why German is more difficult to learn than Swedish/Norwegian for a native speaker of English?

I've heard German is pretty conservative as a language and kept many "features" along time (which make it more difficult to learn) and despite the numbers of immigrants (which I believe is bigger than those of Swedish and Norwegian) it didn't evolve that much compared to these two languages

This is what I'm saying: 6 Surprisingly Easy Second Languages for Native English Speakers | FluentU Language Learning Blog


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## Red Arrow

Hector9 said:


> But if the simplification of a language is due to the numbers of immigrants, then why German is more difficult to learn than Swedish/Norwegian for a native speaker of English?
> 
> I've heard German is pretty conservative as a language and kept many "features" along time (which make it more difficult to learn) and despite the numbers of immigrants (which I believe is bigger than those of Swedish and Norwegian) it didn't evolve that much compared to these two languages
> 
> This is what I'm saying: 6 Surprisingly Easy Second Languages for Native English Speakers | FluentU Language Learning Blog


I think that the more native speakers a language gets, the harder it gets to change the Standard language.
If one dialect changes in a certain way, then that doesn't mean all other dialects are going to follow.

That's why I think German is so conservative. English also became quite conservative in terms of grammar, but it changed a lot back when it didn't have that many native speakers.

In my previous post, I was mainly explaining the difference between Icelandic/Faroese and Norwegian/Danish/Swedish.


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