Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth.
ATTRIBUTION:
Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910), U.S. author. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, ch. 22 (1889).
Twain’s bewilderment with the German language was a recurring subject: it is “the language which enables a man to travel all day in one sentence without changing cars.” Speakng the language was the main difficulty: “I can understand German as well as the maniac that invented it, but I talk it best through an interpreter.” (Quoted in Greatly Exaggerated, ed. Alex Ayres, 1988).
