Im a native US English speaker and I am learning German. Negating a phrase in German only requires the negation word "nicht" and this got me thinking about how in English we tend to negate with "do not."
For example:
German Sentence: Leg die Zeitung nicht immer auf die couch!
Direct Translation: Lay the Newspaper not always on the couch!
Actual Translation: Do not always lay the newspaper on the couch.
The "do" has to be used to make the sentence work in English, unless I am missing something. What is it "do" doing (lol) here?
A secondary question: In German I mostly ignore the word "doch" because its meaning is so contextual and hard to understand, but I know it usually negates a statement or adds past context to it. In this example the way I read it was "Leg doch die Zeitung nicht immer auf die Couch!"
In this case, what id doch adding? It seems to be nothing, since there's no prior statement or knowledge to negate.
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