Haha, thanks for sharing! I admit that I had to read your sentence twice to understand it.
@ learners of the German language:
What we have here, my friends, is a relative clause within a relative clause.
die, die die, die die Tugend nicht achten, achten
= those who respect those who do not respect virtue
achten wir nicht
= we do not respect
Here’s the translation of each “die”:
- die (1) = those
- die (2) = who
- die (3) = those
- die (4) = who
- die (5) = the (article of “Tugend”)
The subject of this sentence (wir) is placed after the wonderful relative clause mess. In German, it’s possible to change the common subject – verb – object order into an object – verb – subject order.
SVO: Wir respektieren XY nicht. = We don’t respect XY.
OVS: XY respektieren wir nicht. = XY we don’t respect.
(XY = die, die die, die die Tugend nicht achten, achten)
I apologize on behalf of my native language!
It gets even more exciting when such a sentence includes a verb with a separable prefix. The prefix often COMPLETELY changes the meaning of the verb, and if it’s conjugated it just about always winds up at the end of the sentence, NO MATTER WHERE THE ROOT VERB IS (and it’s usually near the front). And especially in formal written German, sentences can be nearly a paragraph long.
This led to problems when I (a non-native German speaker) attempted to translate the work contract of a friend of mine who had been recently hired by a company in Munich, but spoke no German. “What? This sentence makes no sense! How do these words even REMOTELY go together? What the hell is going on here? … ‘zu.’ OH FOR FUCK’S SAKE.” *retranslates verb, goes back to the beginning of the sentence and starts again*
I told him once I was done that he was lucky I was doing it for free out of love, because if i had been charging him, I might have decided to charge per word separating the root verb from the separable prefix. XD
Kimchi and Justice 