Yo, will ya put’em glass on d table, Dude! vs Put the glass on the table
… or a video speaks a thousand word, well…
I’m afraid there’s not much of an explanation there. “Tun” can only be used if:
-
the action has already be sufficiently defined, either by a preceding sentence, or the context of the situation; for example: “Wer hat das Glas auf den Tisch gestellt? Hast du es getan?”
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or if it forms a well-entrenched traditional pair with another word; for example: “Er hat mir Weh getan”, or “Das tut nichts zur Sache”.
Now, one could argue that, since enough Germans use “Tun” in alternative ways, then it cannot be regarded as grammatically wrong. The fact that said speakers are of low social standing should have no impact, if one were to be politically correct. But that leads us down the ugly road of descriptivism vs proscriptivism, and I don’t want to open that can of worms.
A good rule of thumb, by which to judge the suitability of verbs in a given sentence, would be to ask if there exists a verb that describes the action with greater precision. Ambiguity and the German language don’t coexist well together anyway.
I as a German kinda like this statement very much, but have to contemplate it some more, OTOH it’s a challenge to come up with the most ambiguous German sentence one can imagine. I’m a bit drunk, so don’t hold your breath.
Damn, I have been thinking for half an hour now and couldn’t come up with an example, so there may be something to Apollon’s thesis. I’m quite sure though that you can form a construction with two objects where the connection to the verb can be ambigious, but I can’t think of an example right now.
It seems that the issue is one of semantics and idiomatic usage rather than grammar, then. That is, saying something like “Ich habe das Öl auf das Papier getan” doesn’t violate any syntactic rule. There are a lot of other verbs we could substitute for “getan” in this sentence which would be awkward or even nonsensical, though generally speaking as long as they take a direct object and are in the past participle form they wouldn’t also be ungrammatical.
I fully agree. “Ich habe das Öl auf das Papier getan” is not ungrammatical, not in the least bit; it is perfectly in line with the rules of German grammar and syntax. The point we’re discussing here is whether, in this instance, another verb should be used in lieu of tun, but that is a question of semantics, not of grammar and syntax. And as far as I can tell, there is no rule in German or any other language that I am familiar with saying that in each instance, the word with the most specific meaning must be used. Of course tun is unspecific in such an instance, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Speakers of a language are free to choose whatever word they want to use that conveys the message they want to convey, and if that message is unspecific, then it is of course perfectly fine to use an unspecific word rather than a more specific one that would otherwise be available. It’s the speaker of a sentence who determines the word to use, not self-appointed language purists who think they know better which meaning the speaker ought to have conveyed.
To put it in other words: it’s not wrong - it’s merely ugly. In my opinion, that’s the greater sin.
Now, on to other languages! The Greek “βάζω” (VAH-so) has a similarly universal function as “put”. You don’t say “Γράψε την υπογραφή σου εδώ” (write your signature here), but “Βάλε την υπογραφή σου εδώ” (put your signature here). You don’t say “Εναπόθεσε το ποτήρι στο τραπέζι” (place the glass on the table - that would sound outrageously weird, even though grammatically correct), but “Βάλε το ποτήρι στο τραπέζι”, and so on. It seems that Greek is the opposite of German in that it has a high tolerance for ambiguity. In fact, I can think of many Greek words that can mean many unrelated things; many more than in German.
The Italian “mettere” also seems to be a similar jack of all trades. I can’ think of any English sentence that uses “put”, that you can’t translate into Italian with “mettere”.
And once again, like Greek, Italian also has a high tolerance for ambiguity. Consider the word “piano”, which can mean:
- slowly
- softly
- plan
- flat
- storey.
German speakers of English might also want to be aware that to make an exhibition of oneself is a bad thing.
Thanks for the info, everybody. And an interesting thread too.
My little presentation went over well, and I got a good laugh at the line “Germans don’t put anything anyplace because they don’t have a word to do it with.”
Well, it depends on the venue… 
Of course there is the thing that an awful lot of English-speaking people studying German (including me) learn the hard way - “Ich bin heiss” doesn’t mean what you’re probably trying to say.
Yep, it was a hot summer day, and I announced that I was horny to a room full of German speakers. Luckily, they were all either Americans learning German or Germans teaching Americans, so they knew exactly the mistake I had made. I suffered no more than a good-natured laugh at my expense.
(If you don’t speak German - if you’re feeling hot, you’d say something more like “I feel myself hot.”)
Oh man, been there.
Seems to me that there are quite a few ways to create ambiguous sentences in German, but mostly when speaking (as nouns are capitalised in writing).
Bist Du gut zu Vögeln?
Sie standen an den Hängen und Pisten.
I’ve always viewed “put” as a synonym for “place.” The only one of the OP’s examples where it sounds wrong is to replace spreading, but I always thought “I put cream cheese on the bagel” was just talking about placing it on the bagel, with the spreading just implied. I just envision “put” as meaning “to make something be in a certain location.”
I bring it up, because I ask if German has a word like “place” that would work in most circumstances for “put.”
Those two are classics. Grrr that I didn’t come up with one of those last night. Shakes fist at Uniqueorn
Mach 'ne Fliege! 
Congratulations! I’m glad it worked out. But after all that has been said in this thread, do you really still think that that’s so? E.g.:
In other words, what you observe about German is true for any other language. (And these aren’t even the idiomatic uses of put, as bordelond says, though it includes those. Just the regular uses of put won’t have a single word in ANY language that can be unilaterally substituted.)
It happens a lot (even on this board), where people will say, “Such-and-such language is unique because it doesn’t do this thing.” But all they’re really saying is that it doesn’t do this thing the way English does it. In fact, it does “do this thing”—just in different way. The same can be said for the implication expressed above that German somehow can’t be ambiguous. Of course it can be ambiguous.That’s one of the hallmarks of natural human language.
More often than not the grammar and semantics of language are co-determined. What, for example, makes a verb transitive or intransitive? It’s not determined by some kind of pure, innate grammatical essence—it’s determined by its meaning, and that, in turn, will derive from its usage.
See, I told you, it’s a highly valued form of wit, not juvenile humour! Shakes fist at girlfriend
NO!
The German language is not as open to interpretation as English, where you have 57 words interchange and still mean the same thing, but may have another 174.378 meanings if you say it at 3.17am or at noon.
In many cases English - German or vice versa does not translate well word for word, e.g: “I’ll sleep a round” literally word for word translation to German means " I’ll have a nap" (Ich gehe eine runde schlafen) where as the English meaning is slightly different.
I just take the English verb and tack “-en” on the end to make it a German word. Or if I want to be extra fancy add “ge-” to the front:
Put the dish on the table.
Putten Sie die Schüssel auf den Tisch .
Die Schüssel auf den Tisch geputten Sie.
It helps that my family speaks even worse German than I.
That sounds like the language in an instruction manual for a really crappy gadget from China. 