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German diff between "fertig" and "bereit"? | ||
Tags: Meaning of words | German | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| lingoleng Senior Member Germany Joined 5299 days ago 605 posts - 1290 votes  | Message 25 of 26 15 November 2010 at 11:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
This is not so easy, bit I'll try. Standard is: Schluck den Kaugummi nicht! Erschieß den Hund nicht! Gib mir das Buch nicht! Lass den Dreck nicht liegen! Now, there is something linguists call pragmatics, it means not much more than that each sentence does not stand for itself ("standard"), but is usually said after an utterance which has been said before, and only the flow of all the sentences is what gives meaning and structure to the language. There may be a situation like this: To save your life you have to kill your cat or your dog. You take your gun and aim at your dog, but your friend, who knows better says: "Erschieß nicht den Hund! Erschieß lieber die Katze, nur das kann dein Leben retten!" Not the dog, please. In a different situation you may want to know wether you should kill your old blind dog, but your friend tells you: Erschieß den Hund nicht. He can still have a lot of fun. Don't do it! Two different sentences with different meanings. Erschieß den Hund --- nicht! (Du musst das nicht tun.) Erschieß --- nicht den Hund(, sondern die Katze)! This is not more than a weak try using a silly example, but may give an idea how these differences can be meaningful. (Real life speech may be deviating from the "standard" for lesser reasons, one makes mistakes, is clumsy when bulding a sentence and so on, but communication still works, no problem.)
I don't see a real difference here. "Wohin" is slightly more formal, "wo ... hin" slightly more colloquial, but correct and very common. So there is only a difference of style and register, not of meaning. (Such split, discontinued words (e.g. wohin -> wo ... hin; woher -> wo ... her) are an interesting topic, in English this scheme is dominant (Where do you go to, where do you come from) while in German there are two patterns, as in your example. In some cases the acceptability of the splitting varies from dialect to dialect. "Davon halte ich nichts. " can be "Da halte ich nichts von." in northern dialects and may sound strange to a southern ear (like mine), but (my) "Da halte ich nichts davon." with a kind of doubling is not necessarily better or less strange ... ;-) 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 LauraM Pro Member United States Joined 5353 days ago 77 posts - 97 votes Studies: German Personal Language Map | Message 26 of 26 16 November 2010 at 7:18am | IP Logged | |||||
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Wow, thanks soooooooo much for taking the time to explain that!!!!!
I have so much to learn! Thanks again! 1 person has voted this message useful |
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