German is claimed to be a very flowery language in which one subordinate clause chases another. true. After all, we, the Germans, intend to live up to our forefathers’ reputation to be “the land of poets and philosophers”. English, by contrast, is much more straight forward with its no-nonsense attitude towards just getting the message across, as the following example demonstrates:
“Lord Bacon, in “the true marshalling of the sovereign degrees of honor,” assigns the first place to “the Conditores Imperiorum, founders of States and Commonwealths “; and, truly, to build up from the discordant elements of our nature the passions, the interests, and the opinions of the individual man, the rivalries of family, clan, and tribe, the influences of climate and geographical position, the accidents of peace and war accumulated for ages, – to build up from these oftentimes warring elements a well-compacted, prosperous, and powerful State, if it were to be accomplished by one effort or in one generation would require a more than mortal skill.”
(Orator Edward Everett at the commemoration of the Soldiers National Cemetery in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, on November 19, 1863)
Check out the following link for the full address, unless you are in a rush. 😉
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Gettysburg_Oration
PS: I came across this quote in Bill Bryson’s “Made in America”. I have this as an audiobook, read by the unbelievably talented William Roberts, and I can highly recommend it. Then again, I can recommend pretty much everything I have heard bill Roberts read. He could read the telephone directory of Stockholm and still be awesome. 🙂
Markus' bilinguale Website - manche Sachen auf Englisch, some in German 