Hello everyone,
and welcome to another episode of Prefix Verbs Explained. Today’s verb will help you unfairly accuse people of stuff and take shelter from rain. Yup, I’d say that sounds just like the average meaning span of a German prefix verb :).
So let’s take a look at:
unterstellen
Stellen is to put. Well, actually stellen is a specific kind of putting and and there’s also setzen and legen but for today to put is good enough. You can also combine stellen with a self reference. Literally, that would be “to put oneself” and that’s used as to stand in sense of getting into the state of standing.
- Ich stelle mich auf den Tisch.
- I stand up on the table.
- Practice pronunciation – click once to start recording and again to stop
Now, let’s get to the prefix unter, the sister of under, and that is simple and not so simple.
What’s simple about it? Well, unlike many prefixes it can only add one notion to a verb: below-ness. And what’s not so simple? Well, unter doesn’t have two meanings, but it does have two grammars.
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The article says this example uses the ge form: Der Geschäftsführer des Vereins ist dem Präsidenten unterstellt. But shouldn’t that be untergestellt? Geez, am I missing something?
ge-form is the term I use for the “participle 2” of a verb because most German verbs do get a “ge-“. But not all of them. Verbs with inseparable prefixes do not get a “ge-” and “unterstellen” in the sense of “subordinating” is inseparable, so the participle 2 is “unterstellt”, while for the separable “unterstellen”, it’s “untergestellt”.
Let me know if that helps.
Hi Emanuel!
You write “Especially in context of computers (for lowering FPS, bit rate, brightness or other stuff) runterstellen is THE word”
What word would be idiomatic to mean the contrary, i.e. “increase the FPS/bit rate/brightness” ?
thanks!!!
Good question. “hochstellen” would work, but also “hochsetzen”, “erhöhen” or “höher machen” :). The last one is pretty colloquial.
thanks a lot!
Absolutely. And I think I’m mixing up unterstellen and unterlassen, so I apologize for that. Anyway, how about this: The pilot requests that all passengers refrain from moving about the cabin. Would there be a word “refrain” from this sentence that I could also use in a sentence like, I couldn’t refrain from laughing. ? Thanks a lot for your help.
Ah, I see. You could use “unterlassen” for that but in the plane example it would sound super mega stilted and complicated, mainly because you can only “unterlassen” nouns
– Der Pilot verlangt, dass die Passagiere das “In der Kabine RUmlaufen” unterlassen.
Using the verb with a “nicht” would be much more idiomatic.
I think “unterlassen” is mostly used in combination with a pronoun like “das” and it sounds rather formal (so I guess it’s a good fit for refrain after all). And it usually makes the activity in question sound negative, so I can’t really picture it in the sentence with “laughing”. Not that it would be wrong… it’s just nothing I would say. Hope that helps.
With verbs, you would use “unterlassen” like this: es unterlassen, etwas zu tun. Or you take a verb and turn it into a noun, as in “das Rauchen unterlassen” (which would fit perfectly with your pilot/cabin sentence – “Wir bitten alle Passagiere, das Rauchen zu unterlassen”
Hmmm, I’m not so sure about the verb thing:
– Ich bitte Sie, es zu unterlassen, nach um 8 Flaschen wegzuwerfen.
I mean… it’s proper German but it sounds overly complicated and I don’t think people use this structure very often. That’s just my impression though.
Is this in reference to my comment? I was just explaining the two different uses – one with a verb (infinitive), the other with a noun. I agree that it’s not very colloquial, but “unterlassen” never is, really!
Hello, new here. I’ve been struggling with the word “unterstellen”. In specific, I’m looking for a good way to say “refrain from doing”, but there doesn’t seem to be a general term, unless I’m mistaken. Any help?
Can you give an example sentence? That makes it easier to make a pick. (“unterstellen” is definitely not the right word, though)
It might be possible to use a “lässt sich nicht” construction to express such an idea.
Can you give some context or an example phrase? I really don’t see how “unterstellen” and “laesst sich nicht” are connected
I agree, I don’t see much overlap either. Sure, the result of both is the same… something can’t be done or I refrain from doing it… it’s not done either way. But that’s about it.
That 10,000 you spent on a transition course – was that a Trump University course?
Great article a usual. Your work is invaluable.
It actually was :). And let me tell you something… it was great. Other courses are a total disaster. This course was so much better. SO much better. Believe me.
Hello Everyone!Thank you Emanuel and to all the Donors for my 6 Months free Subscription!
This is a great Blog!It’s very useful and literally making the German language easy to learn :-)
Ja, persönlich finde ich das Schriftgröße ein bisschen zu klein. Oft zoome ich heran, um das Text einfacher zu lesen.
Kennst du übrigens Anki? Ich spiele mit dem Gedanken, einen Anki-Deck mit den Beispielsätze von deinen Blogposten zu schaffen. Ich würde auch gerne den Karteikarten deine Audiosamples hinzufügen, wenn du nichts dagegen hast. :)
Ich teste dann glaub ich mal, wie es mit etwas größerer Schrift aussieht :). Anki kenn ich. Ich hatte auch mal 2 Decks gemacht, aber ich benutze das selber nicht, und habe kein Gefühl für’s Deck-Machen.
Ich habe jetzt seit ein paar Wochen eine Praktikantin (ja wirklich… eine echte) und die hat Lust Anki Decks für die Posts zu machen.
Aber du kannst natürlich auch gerne… und die Audios kannst du auf jeden Fall verwenden. Ich habe die jetzt alle auch runterladbar gemacht :)
Is the “runter” in “runterstellen” a separable prefix? Is the written past [Präteritum(?)] “Ich stellte die Pflanze vom Fensterbrett runter.” And “Ich stellte jetzt erst mal einen Eimer drunter.” Or is this construction just not used in writing. Or is “darunter” used instead? Thank for another great blog.
Yeah, r-versions are always separable (and dr-versions, too). Both your sentences are correct. I don’t think I would use them in spoken German but if you give a somewhat longer account of an event you could totally do it. For writing they’re definitely a bit too colloquial but in a modern pop novel, especially one written in first person narration they would fit well.
Font size is absolutely fine, as is the typeface.
“ich stelle mich auf den Tisch
I stand up on the table”
I would say in English we could distinguish between
I stand up on the table = I am already sitting/lying on the table and then I stand up
I get up onto the table = I am standing on the floor and then I move onto the table
How would you distinguish the two in German?
Hmm… I don’t think there’s a specific distinction.
“Ich stelle mich auf den Tisch”… if I just hear that sentence, I’d assume the person gets up on the table and then stands up. But that’s just because people don’t often sit around on tables. So yeah… you’d use context.
WOW! this is so much more manageable. I look fwd to being about to stomach the whole platter you serve up, but until then this is perfecto! Danke schon! :-)
Yeah, I kind of want to balance all the looong intense treatments with more lighter, quick articles that are easy to digest :)
Yes font is too low
I would say insinuate almost always has a negative connotation. You wouldn’t hear someone say “he insinuated that I was good at math.”
But insinuation also almost always means that someone implied something rather than said it. So “Du hast den Kaffee alle gemacht” would not be an insinuation.
Hmm… interesting. How would you call the coffee sentence then? Is there a verb for it?
No one would ever say that of me, that’s for sure :-)
Tea then :D
That was meant for the maths comment, not sure why it ended up here :-)
To insinuate ist aber eher “andeuten”…schwaecher als unterstellen
Yeah, I don’t have that great a feel for the tone of “insinuate”. Can it carry a negative tone at all? And how would you translate “unterstellen” then?
Yeah, I was afraid you’d ask that :-) I guess there isn’t a perfect translation – I guess in most cases I’d use “accuse of”, because that’s what unterstellen really is; you’re not just hinting at something, you’re assuming it…
Okay, so I guess “unterstellen” is somewhere between “insinuating” and “accusing” in intensity and directness.
I’m just now getting to this, but I think the best possible translation for “unterstellen” would be “allege”, which carries a very skeptical tone, like a defense attorney attacking the prosecution. (Worth noting that the main verb is not used anywhere near as frequently as its adjectival and adverbial forms: “alleged” and “allegedly”.) However, the best translation may not even be in words, but in tone. English speakers tend to use sarcasm to dismiss another person’s argument, e.g. “Apparently, I was the one who broke the lamp” or “I guess it’s my fault the cat got out”, etc.
quick question that came up when I was reading this post. Totally unrelated other than the phrasing appears in one of the examples.
Leer machen vs alle machen both mean to finish or empty or do they? I wondered if one was more umgangssprachlich and preferred over the other or if they have clear distinct meanings and can’t be interchanged. If you already wrote an article on this then tut Mir leid. Du hast so viele geschrieben, dass ich kann mich nicht richtig erinneren, ob ich etwas hier gelesen hat oder nicht.
Grüß aus Schottland
Paul
Hey man, sorry for the delay :). Good question:
“leer machen” is to empty in sense of just taking out the content for the sake of getting the container empty.
The main idea of “alle machen” is to eat up or drink up food. So “to finish” is the better match here. You can also use “leer machen” for that, for example in context of emptying the milk, but you wouldn’t find “alle machen” for emptying the trash… that’s not even understandable.
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