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A great example of the beauty of the english language. German translation: Büffel-büffelnde Büffel büffeln Büffel. Not nearly as nice.
by Odenwaelder 8y ago
A great example of the beauty of the english language.
German translation: Büffel-büffelnde Büffel büffeln Büffel.
Not nearly as nice.
- anonymfus 8y agoDo you say beauty ironically here?
- Kye 8y agoBeautiful in the same way the cloud from an exploded star is beautiful. You wouldn't want to be stuck in its path.
- lultimouomo 8y agoI'd say that it's an example of a flaw in the english language: I don't know german but I think that the fact that not all words are exactly the same in the sentence will make it easier to parse. I'm not a native English speaker but I think I'm fairly proficient, and I find that I struggle parsing newspaper and website titles much more often than I would expect - I never struggle when speaking with people. I think this is due to the fact that short sentences omit articles and prepositions, which makes english way harder to parse since it doesn't have the redundancy in grammatical cues that other languages have.
- nicoburns 8y agoWords being the same makes it harder to parse, but easier to speak/write...
- klmr 8y agoUnfortunately I don’t think the German variant works due to the verb “büffeln” being intransitive. Apart from that, the presence of inflection in German renders the sentence less aesthetically pleasing but alleviates the exact ambiguity that dogs the English example so I’d see it as a plus.
- imurray 8y agoBut you have such nice stories in German! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gG62zay3kck