All my years of taking German has improved my English. Tonight I was out with some of my friends and we were talking about Russian vodka, and I was joking that Russians have 10% blood-alcohol content, but I said it like "Russians are 10% blood-alcohol content having." It was totally a mistake the way the sentence was coming out, and I just added on "having" to the end to make some sense out of what I was saying, but it sounded natural and correct at the same time. Is it the German coming out, or maybe it sounds natural because English grammar is Germanic, or maybe it's actually correct English (at one point)?
You know you've slipped into Germanic syntax when you tell a joke, and everyone looks completely blank until the final word - they were waiting for the verb.
Could be worse! Imagine if you were tyring to tell them to run away from a ticking time bomb. They'd blow up before they understood! LOL
Lmao! This thread made me laugh. I'd say that would be the German influence rather than the English influence--definitely not correct grammatically in English to have the verb at the end!
me and my best friend are always on the look out for these kind of things, even though he does them more often than anyone else.
