Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Sally PB]

Oh, and a rational sentence order! (I’m looking at YOU, German.)

Read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Tongue." Separable prefix verbs...

 

[Mother of Chaos]

We didn't get taught much grammar at school. It wasn't until I learned some German that the importance of it became apparent.

I would come across a single sentence in German, taking up 2 1/2 lines of print, with only one verb, plus somewhere else the auf- or zu- or some other accursed separable prefix ten words away.

I couldn’t figure how to attack the sentence other than by locating the verb and prefix and working backward from there. In my head, I named this “verbenfinden.”

I loved German literature, but holy cow, that was brutal.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

Read Mark Twain's "The Awful German Tongue." Separable prefix verbs...

We thought of separable prefixes at the same time!

 

[BlindLemonChicken]

Is innit another way of saying : ain’t it?

Essentially yes. But you can also just chuck it around where anything feels rhetorical. Something like “he’d make a good soup chicken, innit.” It doesn’t need a question mark because it’s more of a statement in that sense. I’m not sure if it’s used that way elsewhere but where I learned it that was more common. It can be used as an assertion.

 

[fuzzi]

But = though. It's the same here, though more common further south. "How" can also mean "why" - again, more common in certain areas.

Innit is literally a shortened version of "isn't it" and generally used similarly to something like "right" or "yeah"

In some areas here in eastern NC the more rural country people say "why come" instead of why. They also ask where you stay, not where do you live.

A native ENC lady I used to work with used an expression I love. When someone said something dumb, she'd respond "You musta bumped yer head"!


I love stuff like that.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

My maternal grandmother was born on a northern Mississippi farm in 1897 and never, ever came close to uttering a curse.

When she was greatly agitated, she would say, "Well, I swan!" She couldn't even bring herself to say the word "swear."

 

[MrsNorthie]

If only my students worried so much about using correct grammar, grading research papers would be so much more pleasant.
This whole conversation has confirmed for me that we are a bunch of nerds. I'm proud to "know" you all.

I can only imagine how difficult teaching is these days. Nerds of a feather?