On 20/05/15 18:18, David Kastrup wrote: > James <[email protected]> writes: > >> However [English] is a very forgiving language, you can really mangle >> our sentence structure and we'll still know what you mean ;) > > Uh no? > > "The dog bites the man" has a different meaning from "The man bites the > dog" whereas in German "Der Hund beißt den Mann" and "Den Mann beißt der > Hund" have the same unambiguous meaning. Star War's Yoda's speech > patterns would not be particularly distinctive in German. "Den Mann zu > beißen der Hund sich nicht entbrechen konnte" is still almost pristine > even though "Den Mann zu beißen konnte der Hund sich nicht entbrechen" > would be slightly less archaic though not staggeringly so. > Except you're doing a ghoti Bernard Shaw on our sentence structure. German declines its articles, so you can tell subject and object by article, in English we have to do it by position *relative to the verb*.
"Bites the man the dog" is weird but unambiguous because we haven't messed up the declension rules. If you just swapped the noun in German I guess either (in this case) you *would* mess up the meaning, or because you have gender rules you'd end up with nonsense. Cheers, Wol _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel
