It's code for "yes".

Funny

Grammar

It's annoying when someone genuinely feels they're right and won't let it go when everyone else knows they're wrong, isn't it?

But the Germans are grammar nazis like no other people. Where we have Palace annuals, crime novels, chick lit and recipe books on our bookshelves they have the complete Duden books on correct German; Rechtscheibung, Grammatik, six kinds of dictionary, treatises on the raging theological argument over whether "the dative is the death of the genitive" (carefully written in the genitive case), when and how to use the imperfect subjunk, and so on. There was nearly a civil war when they made a bunch of decisions about spelling reform, especially regarding the fate of the letter "ß", which is a hard 's' sound after some vowels and at the ends of words and which was supposed to be replaced with a simple "ss", which already interchanged with it in some situations (müssen 'to have to' but ich muß, 'I have to'). The outcome of this was the worst compromise in that the ss-substitution was ordained in a lot of cases but the old letter was retained in some others and not killed off altogether.

In most countries your attempts to speak the natives' language are appreciated or welcomed, but in Germany speaking to them even in degree-level German results in being told off in gramatically correct but idiomatically awkward English with a few germanicised bits. ("Vy are you comink in our room? I do not vant you to come here". I didn't have the bollocks to tell him what that really meant in colloquial English but I did point out that just because we didn't have separate dative and accusative cases for substantives didn't mean we didn't distinguish betwee verbs of motion and verbs of state).

If you persist, you will learn more about strong verbs, subordinating conjunctions, the genitive case and the imperfect subjunctive than you ever were taught in school.

Edited by chateauferret (01 Jun 2017 10.12pm)

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The Ferret
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