not really no, not in common use.
What about things like switch on, cool down, find out…?
Comment on Are separable verbs a thing in ENG?
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
not really no, not in common use.
that’s why learning dutch/german is hard for english speakers. it’s fucking insane to us to read 50+ words before we get the verb.
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 1 week ago
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
those aren’t the same thing.
a german separable verb, like ‘einsteigen’ (to board, get on) literally translated would be
Please get the train to which you are boarding on.
the separable part is the last word in the sentence/clause. we don’t do that in english.
you don’t say ' cool the reaction that we are afraid is going to blow up down’. like, technically you could, but nobody speaks like that and if they did you’d think they were an idiot.
CombatWombat@feddit.online 1 week ago
I think you’re overstating your position here. Many phrasal verbs are most natural when the verb and preposition are separated, and you would not think they were an idiot for separating them:
- I’m going to call my best friend Lenora up
- thank you for cheering my depressed capybara Luis up
- I think we need to cut the gnarly old oak tree down
Maybe it’s not as dramatic as German, but it’s still a correct example and something a native speaker would produce.
bigbangdangler@reddthat.com 1 week ago
There are also working memory constraints, or similar real-time processing constraints, at play which can affect how acceptable (in terms of native speaker intuition) some examples are.
- I’m going to call my best friend Lenora up (very acceptable)
- I’m going to call my best friend Lenora, who I’ve known since high school, up (less acceptable)
- I’m going to call my best friend and longtime dancing partner from Brighton, Lenora up (less acceptable, comma for written clarity only)
I won’t get into the possible differences in the intervening structures (e.g. the relative clause), but as a mostly fair generalization: in these cases, the preference to split the verb into parts is inversely correlated with the number of intervening elements.
- I’m going to call up my best friend and longtime dancing partner from Brighton, Lenora (more acceptable than above)
Something similar occurs without phrasal verbs but with indirect objects optionally expressed as prepositional phrases:
- I gave an extremely rare and hard-to-find cassette tape from Tokyo in the 1980s to Mary (still acceptable, but right on the cusp of awkward)
- I gave Mary an extremely rare and hard-to-find cassette tape from Tokyo in the 1980s (better)
The similarities suggest that the pattern has more to do with heavy intervening phrases, or even more generally syntactic headedness, and not wanting to rebuild or finish building earlier structures later in the parse.
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
Those all sound weird/dumb in English. Yes, some native speakers would produce that, but you’d never be taught English that way, because it’s not standard English.
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 6 days ago
I have noticed that all these examples in English have some kind of “spatial relation” as their second part: up, on, in, off… are these the only ones in English that are really separable, where you really can put other words in between?
cattywampas@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I can’t think of an easier language for English speakers to learn than German.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
German is a hard language for nearly everyone. If it didn’t happen to be my first language, no way would I want to learn it.
cattywampas@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I think learning any second language is hard, but German is probably the easiest for native English speakers because it’s the most closely related of any major language. It was as easy or easier for me to learn than Spanish and definitely easier than when I tried learning Polish or Irish.
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
I think Dutch is even more closely related, and AFAIK has somewhat simpler grammar. To me as someone fluent in German and English, but who’s never learned Dutch, Dutch looks like a mix of German, English, and gibberish.
starlinguk@lemmy.world 1 week ago
No. No it’s not. I speak both fluent English and Dutch and German is an absolute bloody nightmare.
kkj@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
Compared to English, which is three languages in a trenchcoat, or Mandarin, which is tonal and has ~100k characters, ~3k of which is considered the minimum to know for fluency, or Japanese, which has three different writing systems, one of which even high-schoolers aren’t expected to know well?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Compared to English: yes, definitely. English doesn’t really have case markings outside of pronouns, nor adjectival declensions, not even grammatical gender.
Compared to Mandarin: probably German is easier, I agree on that.
Compared to Japanese: I don’t know enough about Japanese to know for sure, but by the standards by which it has “three writing systems”, the Latin (and Cyrillic and Greek) alphabet also has two (uppercase and lowercase). :P
cattywampas@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I hate this “three languages in a trenchcoat” analogy. English is very much a Germanic language with some vocabulary from French. And it’s not unique in that regard either.
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
any romance language is way easier to learn.
cattywampas@lemmy.world 1 week ago
I found German easier to learn than Spanish.
colourlessidea@sopuli.xyz 1 week ago
1 data point does not a sample make
AskewLord@piefed.social 1 week ago
you’re weird.
officially it takes 600 hours to learn spanish/french, and 900 for german.
Zwuzelmaus@feddit.org 1 week ago
Wait until you come across several such clauses nested within one another :)
(which isn’t a problem at all if it’s your native language - but ofc I agree it is easier to read without such stunts)