1.
Eine alte Frau gab einem
kleinen Mädchen einen Apfel. (SVOO)
2. Einem kleinen Mädchen gab eine alte Frau einen Apfel. (OVSO)
3. Einen Apfel gab eine alte Frau einem kleinen Mädchen. (OVSO)
4. Es gab eine Frau einem kleinen Mädchen einen Apfel. (VSOO)
Regarding English and German morphology, one notices once again that German is an inflectional language. While English has
regular and irregular noun plurals (usually -s, but also child - children, mouse - mice) German has not (Vater - Väter, Stadt - Städte, Frau - Frauen, and Kuli - Kulis). "Here
all the declension patterns basically have equal status - as, incidentally, was the case in Old English and Old High German". However, Old English and Old High German underwent different sound changes. In Old English, for example, the medial /x/ was lost, politicization took place (cf. p.6), and the quantity of vowels was changed by lengthening or shortening them. A phenomenon that both languages show is i-umlaut but whereas Old High German preserved umlaut as regular and phonetically transparent, Old English disrupted this transparency. The reason for that is the Old English unrounding of the front round vowel. That means that /œ/ became /e/ and /ü/ became /i/ or /u/ or /e/ depending on dialect. In later language periods English ablaut nouns were gradually replaced and ablaut verbs became irregularities or were shifted towards the regular weak class, so that the former correct past form of ‘help’ which was ‘holp’was changed into ‘helped’, whereas in German ablaut forms stayed.
In Modern English and German lexical similarities are obvious. They can be easily traced back to the older forms of both languages as the table below shows:
English
Old English
German
Old High German
man
man
Mann
man
mouse
mus
Maus
mus
sing
singan
singen
singan
father
fœder
Vater
fater
Some words that seem similar in English and German have different meanings (e.g. knight - Knecht ‘servant’ or hound - Hund ‘dog’). The word knight meant ‘youth’ in older periods of English. In German, it was the same, the Old High German word for ‘Knecht’ was ‘knëcht’, and its meaning was ‘boy’ or ‘young man’. However, during the centuries the English meaning of this word was changed for the age of chivalry.
Apart from semantics, there is also grammatical correspondence between both languages, e.g. in the ways in which Modern English and German built the comparative and the superlative forms of adjectives:
English German
thick dick
thicker dicker
thickest (am) dickst(en)
This is not only the case in regular adjectives. The irregularities show the same correspondences: