> That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do ab

> That allows for a wide variety of phrasings or ‘turns of the word’ that are all dead in English since Norman words do not carry inflections German words do about their location in a sentence, which gives German its flexibility to jumble almost any combination of words into a valid sentence. There is this old joke where two students sit in a lesson and one asks the other, "What did the professor just say?" and the other student answers, "I don't know yet, let's wait for the verb". Another consequence of this flexibility is that stylistic devices that depend on the word order, like the anastrophe, don't work that well in German.