Thursday, February 12, 2009
more on language
heard a girl at uni talking on the phone yesterday and she said "es wird schon gewesen sein". This roughly translates to English as "it will already have happened". The thing that I find most amusing is that this sentence in German uses three forms of the same verb 'sein' (to be). Granted 'gewesen' is an auxiliary form, but still. It's like saying "it has already had have"... or "it was already is is"... you can't even do it in English!
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"It is and will be as it was" ??
ReplyDeleteNot something that beats a sentace with three "sein"s in it, but to defend English - you can do some weird constructions in English too, three consequitive instances of the same word, "that":
"I have that that that man is talking about"
I was sure that there's something amiss in the above, but no, it's the equivalent of:
"I have that (thing) that that man is talking about"
I wonder if anyone can come up with a "4 x that" consequtive construction.
Yeah ok fair enough... but 'that' is not really a verb :) Still - that was pretty impressive!!! I gotta say though - perhaps the reason why Germans on the whole are not a happy people, is because their grammar is so damn difficult! I suppose an empirical study to see the correlation between language and life-satisfaction might be in order...
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