![]() ![]() ![]() 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. I think it is only very obvious that German syntax is more complex, but it does not follow that its expressive power is higher. Also, note that "kriegsgefangenen" itself replaces a sentence, because it means: "those who were arrested in the war". Even if you drop the "who", the sentence still consists of a principal and a subordinate sentence. The prisoners of war, who had been detained almost for two years were finally released.Īs you can see, the English version needs a "who-" sentence. This leads to the possibility of building sentences like this:ĭie seit fast zwei Jahren festgehaltenen kriegsgefangenen wurden endlich freigelassen. This is, I think, a good example for the complexity of German syntax. This can be translated into German in 2 possible ways:ġ - Das ist das Haus, daß von Walter gebaut wurde.Ģ - Das ist das von Walter gebautes Haus.Īs you can see, there is no way to build a sentence like the number 2 in English. The English way of building subordinate sentences is the following famous example: Thus, the long complex sentence becomes easy to build. This is because the case endings and other suffixes act as a kind of identity card for them. 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. Simplification of morphology and gradual ''complication'' of syntax was a completely internal process. Grammar of English has not been borrowed from another language (unlike in Cabo Verdean creole which borrowed its syntax from local African languages), The difference between Creoles and English (or Macedonian) is that the Macedonian vs Russian: Macedonian has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntaxĬape Verdean creole vs Portuguese: Cape Verdean has simplified morphology, but much more complicate syntax as English morphology was simplified, its syntax got more complicatedĮnglish vs German: English has simplified morphology, but much more complicated syntax ![]() Water is jelam or vellam the Moon is tingel or chandre )Ģ. (the only similar language is Malayalam which has one word of Dravidian origin and one of Sanskrit origin for almost everythingĪnd unlike differences in Hindi which are artificially made, all speakers of Malayalam are fine with both words, for example: 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):įreedom or liberty, feeling or emotion and so on Macedonian and Serbian are almost as distant grammatically as German and English!Įnglish has always been an absorbing language, almost like a sponge:ġ. Why Macedonian and Bulgarian are so different than the other Slavic languages, there are no declension, but there are articles! Why is Malayalam grammar so different than the grammar of other Dravidian languages (Verbs don't have inflections of person). Why is French grammar so different than the Italian one (Pronoun subjects obligatory in French, gerund absent in French). Everyone was so sad when she sank.Įnglish is no isolated case. The only remnant of that usage very akin to contemporary German is the feminine nature of the word ship: Titanic was a nice ship. 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.Įnglish 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.ĭon'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). I know that English shared a lot of features with German in the past, but lost them during evolution. German composite sentence is sometimes absolutely similar to Turkish. Even the plural is treated as a kind of gender in German.ģ - The word order is different. 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:ġ - German contains inflected nouns, adjectives, and even articles, while English doesn't.Ģ - German has gender (masculine, feminine, neutral), while English hasn't.
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