On 14/11/17 16:50, Karlin High wrote: > And I just learned something there: > > "Der Hund hat den Mann gebissen" and > "Den Mann hat der Hund gebissen" > both mean "The dog has bitten the man". > > I knew the Russian language had that word-order feature/bug, but didn't > realize German did too. My knowledge of German is mostly limited to a > Schwäbisch-Pfälzisch dialect filtered through 12 generations in America.
This is actually a *normal* feature of most languages. English is actually very unusual in that nouns, for the most part, do not visibly decline (that is - the form used remains the same regardless of whether the noun is subject, object, dative, whatever. The only visible change is the addition of 's for the genitive). "der Hund" means "the dog (subject)", and "den Mann" means "the man (object)", so it's perfectly clear who bit whom, regardless of where the word is in the sentence. You can get confusion, because in German they decline the word "the", and combined with a noun that changes in the right way, you might get it all ambiguous. It's the same with gender - and that can also be confusing especially when making a diminutive. "Die Frau" (feminine), "Das Fraulein" (neuter). "Die Mad", "Das Madchen" likewise. Again, here English is very unusual because words do not have a gender (the objects they refer to may, but that's different ... :-) Cheers, Wol _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
