When you can speak several languages fluently, the word order in that language feels natural. It may seem odd to an American that Danes put the article at the end of the noun, but when speaking Danish, it feels right.
Thought isn't formed in language; it is expressed in language. It's one of the odd features about language that you don't need to form the idea first and then say it.
yrs, andreas www.andreas.com----- Original Message ----- From: "John Wager" <john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Sunday, October 14, 2007 4:47 AM Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: Hebrew Queer Order? (A Non-Indo-European Survey)
I HIGHLY suspect that the Frenchman had German in mind when he made the comment. In German, all the verbs tend to pile up at the end of the sentence. I once corresponded with a graduate school friend who was studying for a year in Heidelberg. At first, his English letters were proper English letters. But over the course of the year, his verbs kept slipping more and more to the ends of his English sentences, until the only way you could get what he was saying was to "translate" the English back into English. Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx wrote:Perhaps someone who speaks a non-Indo-European language on this list (such as Hebrew) can explain us if they think the words in a queer order, too? JL . . . . "Rather, one first has to think it, and then one arranges the words in that queer order" "(A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.)"-- ------------------------------------------------- "Never attribute to malice that which can be explained by incompetence and ignorance." ------------------------------------------------- John Wager john.wager1@xxxxxxxxxxx Lisle, IL, USA
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