Here is a free course that only focuses on reading German, I found it quite fun to play with. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/
Here is a free course that only focuses on reading German, I found it quite fun to play with. https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/
There’s a constructed dialect called “Anglish” that attempts to be this more literally.
There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb".
Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.
> Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
Isn't this because the language we're reading in OP and speak now is the pidgin that developed between Viking settlers and English incumbents? Doesn't that also explain why our pronouns are Scandinavian rather than the ones found in Old English or old Norman?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_English_creole_hypothes...
I think only the third person plural (they/their/them) is of Old Norse origin (ON þeir supplanting OE hie). Interesting, we still use 'em which probably derives from the original English pronoun, not a shortening of "them" (we don't normally chop "th" off the beginning of a word).
Compare for example:
he: OE "he" / ON "hann"
your: OE "eower" / ON "yðar"
it: OE "hit" / ON "þat" (note: still "hit" in some modern dialects)
her: OE "hire" / ON "hennar/henni"
This is not a strong point; "them" is not a normal word. We freely reduce all the pronouns.