I’ve talked before here on the blog about my struggles learning German, since that’s the language I’m trying to master at the moment.
One problem is learning how to put together complicated constructions: when trying to construct complex sentences in German, I often find I lose track of where I’m going with the sentence. If I have too many modifiers that I’m putting into the sentence, I forget what verb I was intending to end with by the time I reach the end of the sentence. It can get quite messy along the way, even if I’m following German grammar rules. I find that by the time I get to the end of the sentence, I have often tangled up the meaning of who did what to whom.
But in all fairness, German isn’t the only language with that kind of problem. I ran across an article a while back that I’ve been meaning to share on the blog. It’s about how English grammar rules can sometimes lead to sentences that are so convoluted that they seem to have lost all their meaning. The English examples in the article are all perfectly grammatical, even though they don’t necessarily seem so at first. Here’s an example:
The Rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt.
A paraphrase of the sentence would be
The cat, who had been chased by the dog, killed the rat who ate the malt.
Click here to see the article, which has the “translation” of the original sentence and how it is actually grammatical following English grammar rules.
To me, the original English sentence is more complicated than anything I’ve run across yet in German grammar. It makes me feel perhaps I’m closer to mastering German grammar than I think.
But then again, it points out that perhaps my next task will have to be re-mastering English grammar. If you’d have asked me before I read that article, I would have said that original English sentence wasn’t grammatical at all.
I sometimes joke around and tell people that these days that I can speak a little German and only a little more English. That’s more true than I thought, I guess. 😉
As all your blog readers would certainly agree, your English is as impeccable as ever. (Though I wonder why you didn’t use “truer” in place of “more true.”)
I’ve noticed that native speakers don’t always follow what ESL grammars specify about how to form comparatives and superlatives. For instance, people seem to say (and write) “more apt” and “most apt” rather than “apter” and “aptest” — which the grammars would indicate. One of these days, I might try to figure out what’s going on. Might be something to do with some prosodic factor.
Will and Dovie, thanks for the feedback and ideas about my English usage. 😉 It is curious what’s going with the comparatives, etc. I think about it after I read your comments, I realized that in my own speech patterns “truer” and “more true” (for example) wouldn’t have the same meaning, in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. Odd – I never thought about that before. There must be a linguistics paper topic in there somewhere…