Comment on "influencers" are setting us back
arctanthrope@lemmy.world 1 week agocompletely tangential, but this is actually an interesting grammatical point. I’m guessing you’re German by your username; “stop to listen to idiots” would mean “aufhören, um Idioten zuzuhören.” “aufhören Idioten zuzuhören” would be “stop listening to idiots.” it’s interesting because “to [verb]” and “[verb]ing” are often interchangeable, but in this case they actually mean the opposite
I understood absolutely zero of the German, but for other non native English speakers who didn’t pick up on the issue here:
The usual phrase here would be “stop listening to idiots”. The sentence that was used, “stop to listen to idiots” means the contrary, that you’ll stop what you’re doing so that you can listen to what the idiot has to say.
Which is a valid option, but an ill advised one.
For the non-Germans who want to know the source of the confusion: It’s basically the same sentence structure in German meaning something different than in English.
to has distinct meanings in “I want to listen to them” and “you should stop to listen to them”. In the first sentence, it’s effectively an article for the activity “listen to them”. In the second sentence, it implies an intent, which could be made explicit like “stop in order to listen to me”.
English uses the progressive (“stop listening”) to disambiguate with words like stop. German instead uses an additional preposition “um” for the intent meaning of to.
(In this case, the meaning difference between “interrupting something” and “stop for good” also has different words, “anhalten” and “aufhören”).
Word for word, “Aufhören zuzuhören” would mean “stop to listen”, but actually means “stop listening” while “stop to listen” would be correctly translated as “anhalten, um zuzuhören”.
For the non-Germans who want to know the source of the confusion
🙋♂️ how’d you know we were here?!
I have a Spinnie-sense for when people are confused about our language, but whether you were curious was a lucky guess. Volltreffer (“Full hit”; bullseye), it seems.
EyIchFragDochNur@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Richtig.