Re: A public apology

From: Nils Gösche (ngo_at_cartan.de)
Date: 03/03/04 

Date: 03 Mar 2004 00:56:17 +0100

Pascal Costanza <costanza@web.de> writes:

> Wade Humeniuk wrote:
>
> > How were you misled to attack him? Who misled you?
>
> Noone. I did this myself. Sorry for the bad wording. Please consider
> that I am not a native speaker. (It is a common error of Germans to
> overuse passive sentence structures in English because it is quite
> natural to do so in the German language. The German idiom I had in
> mind was: "Ich habe mich dazu verleiten lassen...".)

Actually, I think the wording "Ich habe mich dazu verleiten lassen..."
is just as passive in German as the English wording, and as such
evokes the impression that somebody else somehow forced you to do what
you did. However, this way of speaking is indeed much more common in
German, as far as I can tell. For instance, there are many Germans
who almost never use the word "I". They say "man", instead, a German
word that is hard to translate to English, usually either rendered as
"one" or more commonly "you". When these people say "Man hat ja
wirklich keine Lust, das jedesmal zu wiederholen", literally, "One
(you) really doesn't (don't) want to repeat this every time" or so,
what they really mean is "/I/ do not want to repeat this every time."
The percentage of Germans who'd choose the general, passive version is
much higher than that of the English speaking population. I don't
quite know, why. Perhaps this is because the concept of individualism
has never really caught on here, or maybe it is just some sort of
linguistic coincidence.

Regards, 

-- 
Nils Gösche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."
PGP key ID #xEEFBA4AF

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Heroes, a plaque?
    ... In English, half and four / four and a half is 4.5. ... As it was explained to me, the usage is still common in German, but only ... Swiss German orthography is not standardised, ...
    (rec.arts.sf.composition)
  • Re: "Never change a running system"
    ... google has not shown a answer but the interesting fact that this ... expression is more often used in german use groups than (as one could ... proverbial saying "Never change a winning team", which is quite common ... here and apparently believed by Germans to be English. ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Shone (US)
    ... As a native speaker of UK English, I was amazed to read in a German ... phonetics blog that a common US pronunciation of the word ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: National Spelling Bee - national shame?
    ... One obvious example is Iran and Iraq with initial long English ... I which is common in the US but not here. ... with an apparently German first name) so I attempted a German ...
    (sci.lang)
  • Re: A public apology
    ... >> How were you misled to attack him? ... > Noone. ... Sorry for the bad wording. ... > natural to do so in the German language. ...
    (comp.lang.lisp)