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English is weird
ankhtahr:
Right now I feel reminded of a story/joke, with a theme very typical of Hamburg. It's a joke of the "Klein Erna" variant. "Klein Erna" (Lil Erna) is a girl who is very naive, her mother being a big, hard working woman who is not too bright. They often feature very dry, laconic humor (which is often considered to be typical of us northern Germans) and the people are usually talking with a strong "Missingsch" dialect (Missingsch is a mixture of Low German (Plattdüütsch) and ordinary German, which was supposedly created by people who were not educated in ordinary "High German", but still tried to speak it.).
Anyway, here it is:
Klein Erna beobachtet ein Kind, welches mit Matsch spielt und fragt die Mutter.
„Darf dat dat?“ - „Dat darf dat.“ - „Dat dat dat darf!“
Lil Erna is watching a child play with mud and asks her mother:
"Is it allowed to do that?" "It is allowed to do that" "{Unbelievable, }that it is allowed to do that!"
The German word "Das" can mean many things. Most commonly it's an article, more specifically the article for non-gendered things (direct translation: it). At the same time it can also be a pronoun, more specifically a demonstrative, for the same thing. And it can be a subordinating conjunction. In that case it's written "dass" instead of "das" though. Colloquially you can leave away the first part of the sentence when using "dass" and combine it with a intonation which displays indignation. That's why I added the "unbelievable" in the last sentence. It can mean various things, unbelievable is just one possibility.
"darf" is a conjugated form of "dürfen", which translates to "being allowed". In German this word is used in it's active form instead of it's passive form. As a passive construction you would use the more formal "erlaubt sein".
In ordinary German these sentences would have been:
„Darf das (the child) das (the playing with mud)?“ „Das (the child) darf das (the playing).“ „Dass (subordinating conjunction) das (the child) das (the playing) darf!“
Sorry for killing this joke…
Pilchard123:
But am I allowed to do this?
Akima:
Presumably, part of the joke is referring to the baby as "it"? I confess that I do that sometimes. I used to have a bigger problem, because the Chinese words for "he", "she" and "it" have identical pronunciation (written they are 他, 她 & 它 respectively), and would occasionally refer inappropriately to people as "it".
pwhodges:
--- Quote from: Pilchard123 on 14 Aug 2013, 15:29 ---But am I allowed to do this?
--- End quote ---
Of course you are - but then we have to kill you.
ankhtahr:
Well, the German term for child is actually in the third grammatical gender, neuter. (from the latin word neuter, which means "neither of both"). Referring to the child as "it" is correct. It's more a joke about how sentence structure can give a sentence multiple meanings.
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