Re: Heine or Goethe -- Kommen drei Logiker in eine Bar.

On Wed, 19 Jun 2024, Ross Clark wrote:

On 19/06/2024 1:35 a.m., jerryfriedman wrote:

Helmut Richter wrote:
 

On Mon, 17 Jun 2024, HenHanna wrote:

 

Kommen drei Logiker in eine Bar. Der Kellner fragt: "Na, was darfs
sein,
die
Herren? Drei Bier?" Sagt der erste Logiker "Ich weiß nicht", der zweite
auch
"Ich weiß nicht" und der Dritte sagt "Ja"
 
 
------- how this starts with a Verb...

 

In German, jokes are typically told with inversion in all sentences
that belong to the narrative. The word order is the same as that of
questions but the intonation is that of affirmative sentences.
Example (the inversion in the 1st, 3rd and 4th sentence is joke
syntax, the "gehen wir rein" is not but is normal 1st person plural
imperative):

 

  Spielen zwei Pferde Federball. Auf einmal wird es windig und der
  Ball fliegt weg. Sagt das eine Pferd: "Komm, gehen wir rein und
  spielen Tischtennis." Sagt das andere: "Spinnst du? Hast du schon
  mal Pferde Tischtennis spielen sehen?"

 

Telling jokes without such inversion would be unidiomatic.

 
If you don't mind my saying so, that's weird.  How does such a
thing get started?
 

The only other situation I know where a non-question main sentence
starts
with the verb is "sei" (let be) at the beginning of the statement of a
precondition of a mathematical theorem. E.g.: "Sei G eine Gruppe."
(Let G be a group.)  Probably this wording tries to avoid a single
letter at
the beginning of the sentence. Normal grammar would be "G sei ..." or
"Es sei G ...".

..
 
I assume imperatives, like the "gehen wir" above, are too obvious to
mention.
 
Is another situation poetry and song lyrics, at least old-fashioned
ones?  "Sah ein Knab ein Röslein stehn."
 

 
I thought of "Es ritten drei Reiter zum Tor hinaus", an old ballad that Mahler
set to music.

Inserting a spurious "es" at the beginning of the sentence is fairly
frequent even in today’s language, more so in a formal register. The
purpose is mostly to remove a subject that has not previously been
mentioned from the first position which is typically reserved for the
topic of the preceding discourse.

The word order must be "Germanic V2" -- a finite verb comes after the first
constituent in the clause, whatever it may be. If the first constituent is the
subject, you get normal subject-verb order; if it's anything else, the verb
ends up preceding the subject.
The first constituent can be this "Es" [it]. And then it can be left out,
leaving the inverted word order. That's as far as I can take it.

Leaving it out is rather unusual as we see from the rare examples we found
up to now. The remaining sentence is more likely perceived as
ungrammatical rather than old-fashioned.

--
Helmut Richter