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german

Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo!

Compliments of an acquaintance on the ZBB:

Die, die die, die die Gänse gestohlen haben festnehmen werden, werden belohnt werden.

Perfectly grammatical, if stylistically a touch odd. Does anyone want to have a shot at parsing it before I gloss it for y'all?

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Dice, dice dice, dice dice stolen from the Guernseys that have weird festering, very weird and blonde.

Those who arrest the ones who stole the geese will be rewarded?

Hang on, I've got some dies and werdens left over...

Quatsch! You have one future werden for each clause plus one passive werden for the main clause. So I guess "those who shall arrest" would be more strictly correct. Your dies line up perfectly (keeping in mind that they correspond to three distinct lexemes in the English version).

wow. Maybe I haen't forgotten all my German (or had it scoured off by Dutch) quite yet.

Apparently I haven't forgotten as much German as I thought. Google Translate, on the other hand, didn't do so well:
"Those, which are recompenced those, which stole the geese will arrest, will. "

I don't believe 'recompenced' is even a word. At least not with that spelling.

(Oh, and in case you wonder who I am: just a random stranger who also lives in Uptown and loves language.)

It's legitimate if you're English--and long dead. E.g. "Sin cannot be taken away by recompence." (Hobbes, Leviathan) Otherwise, you're probably better off avoiding it.

I remember who you are; IIRC, you very nicely asked to friend me some months ago. And, for all we know, we pass each other on the street every other day as we distractedly eavesdrop on foreign-language street arguments.

In that case I suppose we should congratulate Google Translate for educating the populace by reviving long-forgotten vocabulary. Well done that man...

Glad to hear I asked nicely - I certainly don't recall doing it. These days I should be easy to recognize: just look for the woman wrapped in 17 layers of coat, muttering darkly (and in a variety of languages) about the outrageous winter temperatures in Chicago.

This time of year, in that neighbourhood, that description narrows it down not at all.

Crap--I'm supposed to ask people before I friend them? D'oh!

I've always thought that was a vaguely silly practice despite my affection for courtesy in the abstract. I guess others must have definitions of "LJ Friend" which go beyond "person who reads your posts".

Thanks. I like

st_rev's explication of LJ friend-ing. And I don't post too much on LJ, so you shouldn't see too much junk from me on your friends page (but what I do post here can be a bit maudlin). WRT commenting, you've probably noticed that a good way to get me to comment is to say something about food. :)

Whoever arrests the people that stole the geese will be rewarded.

Nice, this reminds me of the English sentence with 11 "had"s in a row..

I only recently learned that one; the one I've known since childhood stops at eight.

fehlt dort nicht ein Komma zwischen haben und festnehmen?

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