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The amateur linguist in me who, for example, finds it fascinating that Hindi and Farsi are far more closely related to European languages such as English or Greek than they are to other languages in that part of the world such as Arabic or Tamil, has come across an Ars Technica article that appears to demonstrate that there is a "language universal" that binds all language families:
Language takes an astonishing variety of forms across the world—to such a huge extent that a long-standing debate rages around the question of whether all languages have even a single property in common. Well, there's a new candidate for the elusive title of "language universal" according to a paper in this week's issue of PNAS[*]. All languages, the authors say, self-organise in such a way that related concepts stay as close together as possible within a sentence, making it easier to piece together the overall meaning.
Language universals are a big deal because they shed light on heavy questions about human cognition. The most famous proponent of the idea of language universals is Noam Chomsky, who suggested a "universal grammar" that underlies all languages. Finding a property that occurs in every single language would suggest that some element of language is genetically predetermined and perhaps that there is specific brain architecture dedicated to language.
The idea that all the major language families is nothing new, and linguists have documented similar words that seem to be present in different language families all over the globe (e.g., milk). This article may be more evidence of these links, or it may just demonstrate something in the language center of the brain that guarantees that all languages are going to have similar characteristics.
[*] Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @11:12AM
That's a weak sauce. Looks like empty bottle to me.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @11:30AM
Oh? I would not be quite so skeptical. Research into psychology, when it is not being used to study how to control people and force them to obey authority, has discovered that short term memory holds approximately five to nine things at any one time, so it might be a reasonable coincidence that languages tend to organize concepts together in sentences such that the concepts are not separated by more than approximately five to nine words. Bite me.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @11:38AM
Yeah, that's a god damn breakthru. UPS him some medals.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @11:42AM
DHL or else!
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @12:05PM
(Score: 2, Interesting) by pTamok on Friday August 07 2015, @12:04PM
And then you get German, where all the verbs are piled up at the end of an extremely long sentence.
-- > And then you German, where all the verbs at the end of of an extremely long sentence are put, get.
In academic writing, sorting out the concepts is hard work because whole dense paragraphs of text are written with no verbs, and a veritable mountain of verbs is unleashed at the end.
Try reading "The Awful German Language" by Mark Twain ( http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20595 [gutenberg.org] )
He also wrote, in "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”
--> “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 this Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.”
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Friday August 07 2015, @12:12PM
Apologies: that link is to the audiobook.
The text is Appendix D of "A Tramp Abroad"
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/119 [gutenberg.org]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 07 2015, @04:37PM
Actually that's true only for subordinate clauses; for main clauses, the verb is strictly on the second position (well, there are exceptions also to this; in some cases you also have it at the beginning, for example in questions). Note however that the "verb" here is not necessarily the complete predicate; it might be just the auxiliary verb, in which case the *actual* verb again goes to the end; also, some verbs are split in some situations, where one part again goes to the end while the other part remains at the second position. Also note that "the first position" does not necessarily mean the subject; it can be filled by another part of the sentence in which case the subject follows the verb.
tl;dr: While German has indeed the tendency to move verbs to the end, the actual rules are much more complicated.
Your sentence,
would be in German word order (or rather, in the best approximation you can get by only reordering words):
And then get you German, where all the verbs at the end of an extremely long sentence piled up are.
There are also grammatically correct sentences which have the verbs all piled up, but not really at the end of the sentence (I'll mark the verbs in bold for your convenience):
Derjenige, der denjenigen, der den Pfahl, der auf der Brücke, die auf dem Weg, der nach Regensburg führt, liegt, steht, umgeworfen hat, anzeigt, erhält zehn Euro Belohnung.
(Score: 3, Informative) by mendax on Friday August 07 2015, @06:34PM
Indeed. Mark Twain had a love/hate relationship with German. I don't know why he learned it, perhaps to have the pleasure of inflicting his peculiar dialect of that language on others.
In any case, many years ago I sent a copy of that essay to a friend of mine, a native German speaker, to see what she thought about it. She thought it was hilarious and, strangely enough, agreed with some of its conclusions.
Mark Twain wrote somewhere (I think it was in a speech he gave somehwere) that German compound nouns are so long they have perspective. He also wrote that if a cat got hold of a German irregular verb, no more cat!
Of course, Twain had no idea of just how awful ancient Greek verbs are. If he did, he would have written an entire book about it, or have gone insane and hanged himself trying to write one. There is a standard, of course, to conjugate verbs, but the majority of verbs have their own way about it. I once read that anyone who said he was an expert at ancient Greek verbs was an expert liar. Thematic verbs, athematic, reduplication, auguments, -mi verbs, -o verbs, moods, etc. etc. etc. Oh, and let's not talk about noun declension. Those are easier but by the time you're done with verbs, you have no patience for noun endings.
It's really quite a simple choice: Life, Death, or Los Angeles.