It’s such a lovely little sound.
Erm, sorry, but as an absolute statement this is not correct. In subclauses, the verb shifts to the end, but that does not make German an SOV-language. The fact remains that in main clauses, the verb is at the second position, and not at the end.
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I hate to contradict you; but IMO it’s not really controversial to say that German is underlying SOV with V2 in main clauses and some subordinate clauses without an overt complementizer. I think it’s pretty much the consensus.
I have no idea how linguists and grammarians look at German under the microscope, I am merely a native speaker of the language, so while I can tell you if a sentence sounds natural or not, I sometimes can’t tell you why. But that’s also why I can tell you with absolute certainty, that if you remove all subclauses and “overt complementizers” (whatever that may be), and just look at main clauses, you will never see a conjugated verb at the end of a simple main clause sentence.
We may have to agree to disagree here, but for me the basic structure of a language is what you get in no-frills main clauses, and for German that is SVO, not SOV.
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“You will never see a conjugated verb at the end of a simple main clause sentence.”
If you read my post back, you will see that I already said this. We don’t disagree here. I used the word “finite”, but I think we are tallking about the same thing where English and German (but not some other languages) are concerned.
So let’s use auxiliaries to look at an example where the main verb is not finite. If you are right that German is SVO, what word order would we expect? Well let’s look at Yiddish and Norwegian, which are V2 like German but SVO like English:
English (SVO and mostly not V2): I can buy a banana.
Yiddish (SVO and V2): Ikh ken koyfn a banane. 1
Norwegian: (SVO and V2): Jeg kan kjøpe en banan.
Right, so we predict a German word order of:
Predicted hypothetical SVO German: Ich kann kaufen eine Banane.
Actual German: Ich kann eine Banane kaufen.
Saying that German is SOV elegantly predicts the correct word order. To take German as SVO, you have to posit an extra rule that the non-finite verb moves to the end (To what position? Why?).
This is Important, because what looks like an SVO sentence in German is not an SVO sentence. It’s a V2 sentence and both the finite verb and the subject have moved to a higher position in the clause. This is what learners have to learn and my point in my original post is that such sentences do not help English speakers to learn the structure of German because they look like they have the same SVO structure as English. It’s the sentences with the difficult word order that allow learners to learn the correct structure. That’s why we should delight in them when they come up. That was all I was trying to say.
- Google’s transliteration of the Yiddish into the Latin alphabet
Can we just agree that we mean the same thing, but we simply cannot agree on the terminology what constitutes the “basic structure” of a language? I could talk to you all day in sentences that never show the SOV-structure. Of course that would limit the range of possibilities, but we all start with “See Spot run” in the beginning, don’t we?
Ich lese ein Buch. Ich kaufe ein Auto. Ich esse eine Pizza.
Those sentences are all SVO, not SOV. “Ich eine Pizza esse” is not a correct German sentence, which it would be, if the language were SOV in the absolute terms you claim.
The reality is of course that the structure gets more complicated once you introduce adverbials, subordinate clauses and auxiliary verbs, and everything you say about that is completely true, but the fact remains that any simple independent declarative clause in German will exhibit the SVO-structure (or more accurately the V2-placement), and NOT an SOV-structure.
Here is an article on SOV:
And a Wikipedia article on German sentence structure:
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From this latest post, you appear to be talking about linear word order rather than structure. OK, these sentences have an SVO word order. However, I clearly wasn’t talking about linear order and my statement was not “incorrect”, given that I was so obviously talking about structure in my original post.
I say this because if we are talking structure, then no, they just aren’t SOV sentences. They are V2 sentences. Their underlying structure is still SOV, but both the subject and the verb have moved out of their usual positions to higher positions in the left periphery.
The reason this is interesting is that even though learners don’t learn this consciously any more than natives do, they have to learn this on some level. Because learners aren’t consciously applying word order rules when they speak German; they are applying the structures they have learned more or less unconsciously (some people like to use the word “acquired”) and that structure, for German, is SOV (+V2).
The terms “SVO” and “SOV” are well defined within linguistic topology, and within this definition, German is an SVO-language, and not an SOV-language. That was the only point I wanted to make, because you claimed that
Japanese is an SOV language, German is not. Not according to the normal definition of those terms. Within this basic classification, you look at the simplest sentences you can form in a language, and for German, this is SVO, and not SOV. Again, if it were, then “Ich eine Pizza esse.” would be a standard German sentence, which, again, it isn’t. Ich (S) esse (V) eine Pizza (O) – SVO
I want to repeat that nothing you say about auxilliary verbs and subordinate clauses and V2 is wrong, but that doesn’t change the fact that as far as the classification within linguistic topology goes, German is SVO, Japanese is SOV, and Welsh is VSO.
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I’m agree with @Hendrik. German is at its core an SVO language with the quirk that participles and infinitives must go at the end of the sentence.
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Typology? Then we are talking about different things here. The following definition from the the very Wikipedia article you quote on SOV explains why we are getting our wires crossed:
“German and Dutch are considered SVO in conventional typology and SOV in generative grammar.”
Typologists of that kind are using linear word order (and many other things) to compare large numbers of languages and look for patterns. They aren’t trying to understand the structure of individual languages. In fact, I don’t even agree with those typologists, since German main clauses can also have VSO (Jetzt esse ich eine Pizza) or OVS (Pizza esse ich nie wieder) orders by that definition. I took a look at the German entry in WALS and as far as I can tell, other typologists classify it as having no dominant word order, which is at least true and probably useful for doing typology; but about as uninsightful as it gets for understanding the structure of German.
So if we’re looking at the structure of German rather than a surface comparison of thousands of languages, then it’s neither wrong nor even controversial to classify German as SOV. You can disagree with me; but you can’t just flatly say it’s incorrect.
The reason you don’t say “Ich eine Pizza esse.” is because of V2. Neither the subject nor the verb is in its normal position in a V2 sentence. They both move to the left periphery. This is not about word order but about structure. To see the difference, look at the following two English sentences:
- He likes Bob.
- Who likes Bob?
These have the same word order (SVO), but (probably) different structures. The subject “he” is in the normal English subject position; but the subject “who” is probably (there’s some debate) in a diferent, higher position.
You can see the German subject in its canonical lower position by preposing an adverb or an object (as I did in the 2 sentences above).
Also, remember that you can say “ich eine Pizza esse.” in non-V2 clauses, for example:
Er will nicht, dass ich eine Pizza esse.
This is not a special property of subordinate clauses, it’s actually almost the other way around! It’s rather that not saying it that way is a special property of V2 clauses. Some subordinate clauses are also V2. Compare:
- Ich hoffe, dass du das Buch liest.
- Ich hoffe, du liest das Buch.
This matters, because earlier you said that the verb shifts to the end in main clauses; but that’s not what happens. What happens is that the finite verb shifts to second position in V2 clauses.
This probably seems unintuitive if you are wedded to the idea that main clauses are the “no frills” clauses; but in fact, the weird stuff happens far more often in main clauses in language after language. V2 is not the normal “no frills” order, it’s a special extra thing that happens in some clauses (including all main clauses).
I applaud your tenacity in producing a huge wall of text trying to explain the German language to a native German speaker, but sadly, in this context, it is also completely irrelevant.
Linguistic typology classifies languages by the structure of their most basic sentences, and by that classification, English and German (and many other European languages) are SVO, Japanese is SOV, and Welsh is VSO.
All examples you cite involve a deviation from the basic premise, so of course these sentences display a different structure, and while you can get “ich eine Pizza esse” as a subordinate clause, this is a word order that you just will not see in an independent clause with the only predicate being a single conjugated verb.
For my part, this exchange has well and truly run its course.
Edit to add: Subject–verb–object word order - Wikipedia
I just stumbled across this. No, that is not what I said. I said that the verb shifts to the end in subclauses. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
I made a mistake, mate. I wasn’t putting words into your mouth. I meant main clauses. It’s still wrong.
The word I used is the same thing as the word you used. Typology or topology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_typology.
I’ll try to be more concise:
- Seeing German as underlyingly SOV is not controversial. You can disagree with me and you have pointed out that typologists don’t usually classify it that way; but you can’t just say it’s incorrect. It isn’t.
- In a V2 sentence, the subject also has to move (or “move”) from the canonical position to first position every bit as much as adverbs or objects or anything else that might be expressed in first position. No V2 sentence is basic in this structural sense. I’m sure you are right that in terms of frequency and of communicating meaning, putting the subject in that first position is more basic; but we’re talking about structure here.
- Because of V2, subordinate clauses without V2 show some aspects of the basic structure of V2 languages more clearly than main clauses. Again, not really controversial.
- All of this means that a sentence with word order like English gives the learner no evidence that its structure is different from English (which it is). It’s the sentences with the difficult (for English speakers) word order that will help them learn the real structure. That’s why we should celebrate these sentences when they come up on the app.
- I was happily sharing this when you decided to post to say that the intial premise was not correct. You really took the joy out of it for me with that by the way. If you’d just said that some linguists (especially typologists) classify these things differently, it wouldn’t have had the same effect. So I was not trying to explain German structure to a native speaker; I was explaining why my initial post was not incorrect, in order to try to get some of the joy back.
- The fact that you are a native speaker (which you have pointed out twice now) means you speak much better German than me and nothing more than that. It doesn’t make me wrong about this.
It was never my intention to take your joy away. You made a statement that I perceived as wrong, and I explained why I thought that statement is wrong in my eyes. You have made it clear that your scope was different, so in your eyes your statement wasn’t wrong.
Within the context of your post, I see what you mean (and once again, all your examples were spot on), but as an absolute statement taken out of its context (and looking through the glasses of basic typology) it was problematic.
So each of us is right coming from their perspective, and I hope we can agree on one thing: Grammar is hard, but interesting 
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I think I’ll leave grammar aside for now, like I had done with the Welsh course. 
I have a curiosity about vocabulary though:
I want = Ich möchte
You want = Du willst
I kinda remember möchte being (also?) like I would like (vorrei in Italian), but can’t remember if there’s any other reason or standard for choosing one or the other.
Is there?
As far as literal translations go, “I want” equals “Ich will” in German, but especially in the first person, “ich will” is usually considered too pushy and aggressive, so we usually opt for the more polite “ich möchte”, which would literally translate to “I’d like”. You can further “soften” this to “ich möchte gern”.
So “What do you want?” could literally be translated as “Was willst du?”, but you could also opt for the more polite “Was möchtest du?”.
Does that help?
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Yes, thanks a lot!
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Super helpful enquiry. I am exactly the same stage.
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Not really relevant to the question, but I always feel that möchte has such a lovely sound to it.
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