Knowing relations between words can help understand their meanings and build a more connected vocabulary network. Here, you can explore parents and offspring and discover the whole family.
- shows how many children or parents the word has
- get the translations and a link
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Sources for Etymology:
- Check "verstandlicherweise" on DWDS.de
Biggest German Dictionary, great for etymology, usage frequency and collocations) - "verstandlicherweise" on Wiktionary (English version)
(For etymological connections across European languages. Not always accurate) - Etymonline.com - Origins of English words
My favorite source for the origin of English words.
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Guten Tag
Hoffentlch geht alles gut mit Ihnen, besonders das Baby.
NOT to qualify adjectives
Yet in this sentence
Ich weiß, ihr seid verständlicherweise besorgt
Besorgt seems to be an adjective
In the second sentence in the entry, I have no idea what the word is actually modifying
Auf wiederschreiben
It qualifies the action.
– being worried
– understandably being worried
I think my translation threw you off, since I had “understandably” before worried, but in German, that’s not how it feels. So I now changed it the example.
What it does in the second sentence is basically expressing a sense of “We can understand WHY he didn’t say anything”. You can verstehen whatever is described in the clause.
Does that help?
Hmmm….
Not sure about that.
If we wrote
They are very worried
Then clearly the “very” modifies “worried”
But as I sit drinking my morning coffee I can see how you new translation clearly moves it away from modifying “worried”
In fact it is that very kind of translation that confused me about the second sentence, as when we put the word understandably at the very beginning or end, it just seems strange to me that it’s working as an adverb, as it seems to apply to the WHOLE sentence, in which case I’ve no idea what to call it. That’s a reflection of my lack of perfect knowledge (or even worse, my perfect lack of knowledge) of English grammar, nothing to do with German.
Oh well…..
I just noticed that it’s also a word order issue.
– Thomas ist verständlicherweise enttäuscht.
This LOOKS like “verständlicherweise” is front of the adjective, but it really just sits in the midfield of the sentence, like other adverbials would do.
– Thomas ist verständlicherweise von Maria enttäuscht.
enttäuscht just sits at the end of the sentence.
In order to tell whether the adverb modifies the adjective, you’d have to ask for the phrase.
– What are you?
– Understandably disappointed.
I guess it doesn’t sound too strange in English but still, there is no difference in being disappointed and being understandably disappointed. Disappointed is about you, understandably is not.
While “disappointed” vs “very disappointed” is a clear difference in what YOU experience.
Generally, adverbs modify verbs (hence the name) or verbal phrases. They add info to the action. That can be temporal, local, means or whatever. Them modifying adjectives is more of a side hustle.