Spanish Translation
¿Por qué me estoy riendo?
Shouldn’t it be Warum lache ich?
Or are both correct?
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“Warum lache ich?” is the usual sentence order, but as you might already know, in German you can often change the word order to stress certain parts of the sentence.
“Warum ich lache?” is actually sometimes used as a precursor to explain to someone after the reason for why the speaker is laughing. So it never really stand on it’s on, but is followed with “Weil …” or something similar stating the reason after. It is often used when the speaker is annoyed or incredulous that the other person is surprised/doesn’t get why they are laughing. To me it sounds a bit passive aggressive, but that has to be determined by the context. And maybe some other natives might interpret the emotional nuance differently.
Because usually you usually would just respond the reason and not also put “Warum ich lache?” davor. It’s not a mistake, though.
Example dialogues:
A: “Warum lachst du? Ist doch nichts Komisches passiert.” (Why are you laughing? Nothing funny happened.)
B: “Warum ich lache? Weil dein Verhalten so bescheuert war, dass ich nicht anders konnte.” (You ask why I’m laughing? I had no choice. Your behaviour was that stupid.)
A: “Warum lachst du? Ist etwas Lustiges passiert?” (Why are you laughing? Did something funny happen?)
B: “Ich habe eben eine Schlange mit Hut und Bart gesehen.” (I just saw a snake with hat and beard.)
Sorry for the bad examples for funny stuff xD
I can’t think of any good examples right now.
My main point being that the second dialogue is just matter of fact answering the question, why the first shows some irritation/incredulence/annoyance from B about the question for the reason from A.
So thinking on it more it might be used even more often than the expected “Warum lache ich?” since this one would only be used (in theory) when the person laughing doesn’t know why they are and are expressing their confusion.
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Thank you so much for your thorough reply! Your examples were very useful.
The cloze sentence lacks context so I didn’t quite understand the reasoning behind the order of the sentence.
Thanks again Aki!
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