Is this sentence immediately understandable as the same as the English translation?
i.e. If I use masculine nouns then I can use the case markers to change the meaning, for example if I use a bone and a stick - Ein Knochen kann einen Stock brechen. Einen Knochen kann ein Stock brechen.
In the example here however, dein Herz could be nominative or accusative so that doesn’t work.
The machine translators Google & DeepL and the AI explanation all see this as “But your heart can break love”, presumably relying on the word order to select a subject and object.
To a human with an understanding of the concepts of love and broken hearts, does this sentence immediately make sense (perhaps with a somewhat poetic flair).
Is there a better way of keeping the sentence in this order and still have the same meaning as the English sentence (possibly by using some preposition such as durch, aus, vor or whatever would actually be most appropriate in this case)?
It’s ambiguous, and I did read it wrong at first. And the comma was suspicious.
The only way I see to make it unambiguous is to use the passive:
Dein Herz jedoch kann von Liebe gebrochen werden.
Otherwise, this is dependent on the context, which I suspect is hiding in the previous sentences we don’t see that the “jedoch” refers to. I would assume the context is something like “Nothing can break your will, but your heart is easily broken by love.”
This unusual word order to me gives the impression that this is taken from some old poetry, or maybe a poem.
It also appears to be the only translation in that order (i.e. heart before love), so I can certainly believe that this is the author showing off their poetic flair or remembering some line of poetry that they read in their youth.