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Comment by ThePadawan | Hacker News Reader

I had a Brazilian roommate who could second this. He (jokingly) complained this was the absolute worst when dealing with split-proposition-verbs:

E. g. "aufgeben" translated part-by-part is "upgive", so "to surrender" or "to give up" in English.

However, in sth. like 3rd position singular, the form would be "er gibt auf" ("he gives up"). But in German, the object goes between "gives" and "up".

Thus, my roommate mentioned a sentence like "Der Präsident gibt sein Versprechen zur Verbesserung der Arbeitslosigkeitsquote auf" (The President gives up his promise about improving unemploymemt rates).

So yeah, parsing German sometimes results a pause while everyone unwinds their stack.

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Well, English too has some interesting ideas where to put prepositions in the sentence, that is, turn them basically into postpositions. For example, "Which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine in?"

The "in" is logically related to "which basket", so one would expect that the question would actually be *"In which basket...", but nope, that's rustic and colloquial at best. I suspect it's because of the word inversion in questions, since in dependent clauses the order is reasonable: "I put the figurine in this woven concrete basket over there".

This is a fascinating discussion.

Could the tension/buffering in that sentence be resolved with something like: "Which basket has got that exquisite marble figurine"? When spoken by a native speaker 'has got' would likely be contracted to "which basket's got"

Sub out 'has got' for 'contains' if you want to be more formal.

Shorten even further to "Exquisite marble figure; which basket?" or "which basket? Exquisite marble figure." Depending on which is more likely to short circuit based on context.

> that's rustic and colloquial at best.

nope, the other way around; "don't end sentences in prepositions" is a formal rule iirc. Quoting Grammarly website,

* Which journal was your article published in? (Casual)

* In which journal was your article published? (Formal)

"In which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?" is perfectly good English. It sounds better to me that the "which ... in" version. (British English speaker.)

To my ears, a slight improvement to this would be to use the word "Into" instead of "In":

"Into which basket did you put that exquisite marble figurine?"

Or within which, with which, yields a pleasant alliteration.

This is the type of errant sentence up with which I will not put.

with that I'd put myself up with, but nice would be if more was written text along the lines of this...

I have in mind an idea for a movie scenario where someone important is on their death bed and says their last words, and nobody can tell what they actually meant because it may be missing the second part of the verb, resulting in a potentially completely different meaning :)

"Was ist der Unterschied zwischen einem Raben und einem Schreibtisch"?

As you mention, it gets even screwier given the opportunity to put a "nicht" (not) at the very end of a sentence to lead listeners down a garden path.

You can do the same thing in English but it's pretty obnoxious.

Yes, but the grammar doesn't lend itself to it quite as nicely (any more, compared to earlier forms of English, IIRC).

In German, the word order "I believe you not" is the proper way to phrase that sentiment, without being pithy about it.

So, "the President gives his promise about improving unemploymemt rates up"?

This is no different in English: "He told the upstanding, proper young woman off".

A cursory search [0] suggests that English allows not having such a wide gap between verb parts if it sounds odd, i.e.

"He told off the ... woman."

German doesn't (directly) give you that chance.

[0] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/77472/is-there-a...

Yes, I'm saying it also allows leaving the gap.

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