I know for example, Mandarin (Chinese) has it like from this sentence: 我睡了八個小時 (I slept for 8 hours), the hanzi: 覺 is omitted in this sentence because 睡 is already a word with its own meaning “sleep” which in itself conveys the meaning of the verb. There are “Euro” languages where separable verbs exist such as Dutch or German for example. Is there an equivalent of that in the English language though?
The closest English has is phrasal verbs like “I turned the light off” or "I went to pick the kids up. Generally verb+particle = new verb. Sometimes you can put a noun between the verb and particle but not always (I looked the toys for vs. I looked for the toys)
These are not just verbs plus postpositions as “I turned the light” and “I went to pick the kids” have entirely different meanings.
not really no, not in common use. there are some dialects and uncommon uses where they appear, but it’s rare.
that’s why learning dutch/german is hard for english speakers. it’s fucking insane to us to read 50+ words before we get the verb.
it’s fucking insane to us to read 50+ words before we get the verb.
Wait until you come across several such clauses nested within one another :)
(which isn’t a problem at all if it’s your native language - but ofc I agree it is easier to read without such stunts)
not really no, not in common use.
What about things like switch on, cool down, find out…?
those aren’t the same thing.
a german separable verb, like ‘einsteigen’ (to board, get on) literally translated would be
Please get the train to which you are boarding on.
the separable part is the last word in the sentence/clause. we don’t do that in english.
you don’t say ’ cool the reaction that we are afraid is going to blow up down’. like, technically you could, but nobody speaks like that and if they did you’d think they were an idiot.
I think you’re overstating your position here. Many phrasal verbs are most natural when the verb and preposition are separated, and you would not think they were an idiot for separating them:
- I’m going to call my best friend Lenora up
- thank you for cheering my depressed capybara Luis up
- I think we need to cut the gnarly old oak tree down
Maybe it’s not as dramatic as German, but it’s still a correct example and something a native speaker would produce.
I have noticed that all these examples in English have some kind of “spatial relation” as their second part: up, on, in, off… are these the only ones in English that are really separable, where you really can put other words in between?
There are also working memory constraints, or similar real-time processing constraints, at play which can affect how acceptable (in terms of native speaker intuition) some examples are.
- I’m going to call my best friend Lenora up (very acceptable)
- I’m going to call my best friend Lenora, who I’ve known since high school, up (less acceptable)
- I’m going to call my best friend and longtime dancing partner from Brighton, Lenora up (less acceptable, comma for written clarity only)
I won’t get into the possible differences in the intervening structures (e.g. the relative clause), but as a mostly fair generalization: in these cases, the preference to split the verb into parts is inversely correlated with the number of intervening elements.
- I’m going to call up my best friend and longtime dancing partner from Brighton, Lenora (more acceptable than above)
Something similar occurs without phrasal verbs but with indirect objects optionally expressed as prepositional phrases:
- I gave an extremely rare and hard-to-find cassette tape from Tokyo in the 1980s to Mary (still acceptable, but right on the cusp of awkward)
- I gave Mary an extremely rare and hard-to-find cassette tape from Tokyo in the 1980s (better)
The similarities suggest that the pattern has more to do with heavy intervening phrases, or even more generally syntactic headedness, and not wanting to rebuild or finish building earlier structures later in the parse.
Ooh, this is a very interesting line of inquiry! Is there any evidence of differences in the working memory of language speakers where there is more tolerance on the amount of words between separable verbs, like the 50 word intervals in German mentioned elsewhere? Your longer examples are starting to get very Silas Mariner energy.
Yeah, I’m not sure it’s entirely relevant to the existing conversation, but maybe at least in part.
I don’t have anything to cite directly in front of me for other examples from non-English languages, but I know some work exists out there, particularly in cognitive linguistics. If I remember right, some papers under the “construction grammar” umbrella touch on this in an effort to explain relative preferences between what would otherwise be equally weighted constructions. Also look into works by Dryer and Haspelmath (together and separately) for similar discussion with a more typological bent.
German does have one typological distinction which might also play a role in how permissive it is with seperable prefixes: the verb-second constraint, which basically exists in the Germanic branch of Indo-European and only a handful of languages elsewhere. This is why German allows basic clauses which are SVO (e.g. Der Hund frisst den Fleisch), but as soon as there is an auxiliary verb, it looks more like an SOV hybrid with the main verb at the end (der Hund wird den Fleisch fressen), or fully SOV if a subordinate of a matrix clause (Wir glauben, dass der Hund den Fleisch fressen wird).
That doesn’t really explain why you have to do ich sage ab instead of the ungrammatical *ich absage, but having to move that ab to the end is at least reminiscent of having to move verbs in the same way. I don’t think there’s even an alternative, so extremely long examples persist by necessity.
Those all sound weird/dumb in English. Yes, some native speakers would produce that, but you’d never be taught English that way, because it’s not standard English. You would be taught those are grammatically incorrect ways of speaking/writing.
German also has native speakers that don’t adhere to standard German grammar, but you’re not going to learn that when you learn German. and if you use that grammar Germans will think you’re weird/dumb.
Where I live people think I’m a dumb asshole because I end sentences with prepositions when I speak.
I might say you’re on rather tenuous ground telling a native english speaker sentences they produce sound weird and dumb in their native language.
No, I’m American. Every language has a standard version, that the educated people speak, and a non-standard versions that mark you as uneducated and foolish that are not socially acceptable in professional work.
And part of becoming educated is learning to stamp out your ways of talking/writing you were brought up with and learn to conform to the standardized version of you language and the correct pronunciation of words and use of grammar. Separable verbs are not allowed in proper English, and even saying things like ‘call up’ are hokey and provincial sounding compared to simply saying ‘call’ or ‘phone’.
I find this view surprising from an American. I find the use of the education system to enforce a “standard” dialect of English rather than studying and celebrating regional dialect at odds with both the project of America and our national character.
Wow, this is ridiculously prescriptivist.
Also, huh? put on, take off, take out, pull over, there’s plenty of separable verbs that are perfectly normal in formal use.
Also also, as one of those “educated” people, dialect differences are cool actually and “stamping them out” should not be a goal.
– Frost
I can’t think of an easier language for English speakers to learn than German.
German is a hard language for nearly everyone. If it didn’t happen to be my first language, no way would I want to learn it.
I think learning any second language is hard, but German is probably the easiest for native English speakers because it’s the most closely related of any major language. It was as easy or easier for me to learn than Spanish and definitely easier than when I tried learning Polish or Irish.
I think Dutch is even more closely related, and AFAIK has somewhat simpler grammar. To me as someone fluent in German and English, but who’s never learned Dutch, Dutch looks like a mix of German, English, and gibberish.
I believe Norwegian and Swedish are easier. They are de-gendered and have the exact same grammer. It is just word substitution and even that is easy because some come from the same root.
No. No it’s not. I speak both fluent English and Dutch and German is an absolute bloody nightmare.
Compared to English, which is three languages in a trenchcoat, or Mandarin, which is tonal and has ~100k characters, ~3k of which is considered the minimum to know for fluency, or Japanese, which has three different writing systems, one of which even high-schoolers aren’t expected to know well?
I hate this “three languages in a trenchcoat” analogy. English is very much a Germanic language with some vocabulary from French. And it’s not unique in that regard either.
Compared to English: yes, definitely. English doesn’t really have case markings outside of pronouns, nor adjectival declensions, not even grammatical gender.
Compared to Mandarin: probably German is easier, I agree on that.
Compared to Japanese: I don’t know enough about Japanese to know for sure, but by the standards by which it has “three writing systems”, the Latin (and Cyrillic and Greek) alphabet also has two (uppercase and lowercase). :P
No, it’s considerable more difficult than most major romance languages.
It’s easier than Chinese, for sure.
I found German easier to learn than Spanish.
1 data point does not a sample make
I guess I’m just built different
And your mother tongue is…?
English. And learning German was as easy for me as Spanish, if not easier.
you’re weird.
officially it takes 600 hours to learn spanish/french, and 900 for german.
i have taken spanish and french and they were way easier to learn than german. German is inflected and has weird grammar compared to spanish and french.
