Nah, our humour and our everyday conversation is chock full of wordplay. Obviously it’s hard to detect the humour if one doesn’t speak the language. Humour is a nuanced thing anyways and also plays with cultural associations.
For example if I were with friends in a pub and only ordered one beer and someone asked me why and I replied: “I muss fei spare” , the text itself isn’t funny
(I have to save money).
But it would be funny because I said it in a slight Swabian accent and because of the cultural association of Swabians being penny pinchers.
It wouldnt be hilarious mind you, just a little funny to spice up conversation.
How would one translate or even understand that?
schnurrito@discuss.tchncs.de 2 days ago
Native speaker of German here and I am not sure about that. German tends to put verbs in the end in a lot of sentences, but apart from that, it’s mostly possible to use English-like word orders in German too; I don’t think the difference is significant enough that it would change the entire style of humor.