Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte (und meine Finger)

Question

I've found this sentence in a modern novel I've been reading. In this context, a woman is manually cleaning the floor and she's quite upset. She says:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte und meine Finger.
_{"Die Halligprinzessin" von Karen Elste. Bastei Entertainment, Feb. 2022}

I understand the sentence but I was just wondering about the structure.

Why und meine Finger is at the end of the sentence? Is this a common way of writing or is it more a literary style? It's not an old novel so I was wondering if the writer is writing in a common language or a bit more old fashion.

As I'm still a German beginner. I find this sentence structure a bit odd.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

German has a relatively lax word order - at least in comparison to English. It is possible to reorder (groups of) words to move the emphasis to them or off them. The former is the case here.

The basic form of the sentence would be:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm und meine Finger schmerzten.

The first problem with this is that "der Arm" is singular, hence "schmerzte", but "meine Finger" is plural, therefore "schmerzten". So, in a strict sense, the sentence should be:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte und meine Finger schmerzten.

But the double use of "schmerzen" doesn't sound well. It is not a grammatical but a stylistic error now. A probable solution would be:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte und meine Finger wehtaten.

Moving the part und meine Finger after the "schmerzte" serves two purposes: first, it solves to singular/plural problem at least partly because the two-sided reference isn't as obvious as before.

Second, by moving it out of the original phrase it sounds like an afterthought: my arm was hurting - and my fingers were too.

Some people will point out that this is not perfect grammar. Now, grammar is like a set of artistic rules: you need to understand them but if you exactly know what you are doing you are able to break these rules to get a certain result. This is called style. Mind you, these rules are still not arbitrary and Thelonius Monk, jazz pianist of quite angular music, once said about another pianist trying to imitate him: "he is making the wrong mistakes". One needs to know and understand the rules to be able to transcend them. Still, it is possible and, done wisely, rewarding.

Answer 2

The book apparently uses first-person narrative (or it's an example of direct speech). And this is just how people actually talk and think. "Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte." is a complete sentence with correct grammar. Then it comes to mind that the fingers also hurt, so it gets appended. If you are strict, you'd consider the result to be wrong and you wouldn't write like that if you could polish your text. You'd get points deducted in a school essay. However, it gives a nice narrative flow and that's probably what the author intends.

Answer 3

This is colloquial speech. This is the way how people think and speak in real life. When you talk to a friend, is it very unlikely, that you always produce grammatically correct and complete sentences.

The author wanted to write the story in the most involving way. She wanted to make the reader feel what the woman felt. So, the author used two methods to let the reader dive really deep into the world of that woman:

• first-person narrator
  The hero of the story and the narrator are the same person. Reading such a text is like listening to someone who tells a real story about herself (or himself).

• colloquial speech
  Normally when you write down something, you write down filtered speech. Spoken language and written language are very different. Written language is much more strict and obeys grammatical rules much more than spoken language. In spoken language you use less full sentences but more fragments of sentences. And not every sentence you speak is perfect. People who produce grammatically perfect sentences when they speak are rare (Klaus Albrecht Schröder, director of Albertina, a famous museum in Vienna, is such a person. Listening to him feels strange.)

  So, when the author doesn't write grammatically perfect sentences, but writes more the way how people speak, this feels much more natural. It feels more like if the woman really tells her story. The reader thus experiences this woman more directly and is also emotionally closer to her as a result.

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Analysis of the concrete sentence:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte.
_{I rubbed until my arm hurt.}

This is a normal and absolutely correct sentence. The part »der Arm« is a nominal group in nominative case, and it is the subject of the subordinate clause. But we can replace this nominal group with an enumeration. Since the subject now contains more than only one thing, the verb must turn from singular to plural (schmerzte → schmerzten).

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm und meine Finger schmerzten.
_{I rubbed until my arm and my fingers hurt.}

But what, if you tell about your arm hurting, and at the end of the sentence it comes to your mind, that your fingers hurt too? The verb in singular has already left your mouth, and you want to tell about the fingers too. This is a situation that you will experience many times when you speak free to somebody. A grammatically correct solution would be this:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte und bis mir meine Finger schmerzten.
_{I rubbed until my arm hurt and until my fingers hurt.}

But this sounds unnatural and it is too long for just a little add-on to the main idea that already has been said. The words bis, mir and schmerzte(n) have already been said, so what you do in colloquial speech is just not repeat them, you omit their second appearance, and what you get is this:

Ich rieb, bis mir der Arm schmerzte und meine Finger.
_{I rubbed until my arm hurt and my fingers.}