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From: rpw3@fortune.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: Of garden paths... - (nf)
Message-ID: <2219@fortune.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Jan-84 15:05:41 EST
Article-I.D.: fortune.2219
Posted: Mon Jan  9 15:05:41 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 10-Jan-84 05:46:15 EST
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#R:uicsl:8600033:fortune:8100009:000:958
fortune!rpw3    Jan  9 10:07:00 1984

The classic "garden path" sentence I have run into was in German.
I don't speak it, but the NMR chemistry research group I was
associated with at the time had to translate the manual for a new state
of the art NMR spectrometer (made by the Germans, of course) which had
no English manual yet. There was this monstrously long sentence that
started near the beginning of a certain page and wound on down the page
and just as you turned to the top of the next page it ended with
"nicht".

Now (somebody correct me if wrong) I was told that in German the
"nicht" at the end not only negates the sentence (which the translator
had been laboriously making into colloquial English), but it also
subtly changes many of the idioms, altering them entirely in some
cases. Hence the "garden path..."

Rob Warnock

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