Re: absolute pitch entry: accept an offset octave (issue 235010043 by address@hidden)

[Wols Lists]

On 20/05/15 18:18, David Kastrup wrote:
> James <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>> However [English] is a very forgiving language, you can really mangle
>> our sentence structure and we'll still know what you mean ;)
> 
> Uh no?
> 
> "The dog bites the man" has a different meaning from "The man bites the
> dog" whereas in German "Der Hund beißt den Mann" and "Den Mann beißt der
> Hund" have the same unambiguous meaning.  Star War's Yoda's speech
> patterns would not be particularly distinctive in German.  "Den Mann zu
> beißen der Hund sich nicht entbrechen konnte" is still almost pristine
> even though "Den Mann zu beißen konnte der Hund sich nicht entbrechen"
> would be slightly less archaic though not staggeringly so.
> 
Except you're doing a ghoti Bernard Shaw on our sentence structure.
German declines its articles, so you can tell subject and object by
article, in English we have to do it by position *relative to the verb*.

"Bites the man the dog" is weird but unambiguous because we haven't
messed up the declension rules. If you just swapped the noun in German I
guess either (in this case) you *would* mess up the meaning, or because
you have gender rules you'd end up with nonsense.

Cheers,
Wol