I pronounce It's mine as tsmine.linguoboy wrote:It might be worth noting here that, colloquially, I've heard Entschuldigung abbreviated to Tschuldigung. (Of course, this doesn't mean it's not still a cluster--I've also heard es tut abbreviated to 'stut.)
When I was learning German, I found genders unnecessarily complicate learning vocabulary, cases were hard but I got the hang of them eventually and now I love them, adjective endings are needlessly complicated but when I got through that, I felt like I had achieved something. Word order was something that just made sense to me after a while until I got to this weird little wrinkle. I find German word order is such an unusual and beautiful pattern and I started to feel it instinctively and then ... there's this little spanner thrown into the works. *screams WHYYYY at the sky* I'm usually OK with it now though and get it right without thinking most of the time, but sometimes I forget to put -st, -n or -t on the hätte or hatte in this position to make it agree with the subject and I think it's because my brain still hasn't fully figured out that this is the finite verb ... it's not at the end and it's not in the second position, so why would it be? *shakes fist at German*awer wrote:A question:
Why the weird verb order in this sentence?:
"Und glaubst du wirklich, dass ich hier sitzen und mit dir sprechen würde, wenn ich ihm keine befriedigenden Antworten hätte geben können?"
It was translated from: "And do you really think that, had I not been able to give satisfactory answers, I would be sitting here talking to you?”"
Why not "geben können hätte"?
Just checking: This word order also happens with werden and two infinitives, right? ... weil ich morgen nicht werde kommen können. Correct? It so rarely appears that I can't quite remember the rule, if it's impossible, possible or obligatory with werden. I know other than that, it's used with haben when there is an Ersatzinfinitiv (infinitive that replaces the past participle) because for some reason, Ersatzinfinitive want to come at the very end of the clause, but since werden requires an infinitve anyway, there are no Ersatzinfinitive so ... *munches on Pretzel*