And, as I think you tried to mention, a long German sentence can take a completely different turn by the time it ends. So unless one knows the person (he/she said this a thousand times before, yawn) you can not predict what the person will say.
Aren’t you contradicting yourself with this? After all the first long sentence would be truncated to “a small green music box”, rather than “a green small music box”. And the other to “a huge brown office building”.
Time for the obligatory reference to Twain’s magificently funny ‘The Awful German Language’, the classic essay that has brought comfort to generations of despairing English speakers tackling the mysteries of German:
"An average sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity; it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of speech–not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in any dictionary–six or seven words compacted into one, without joint or seam–that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here and there extra parentheses, making pens with pens: finally, all the parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of it–AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what the man has been talking about; "
And yet I personally find German a marvellous language. Not many Germans actually speak it properly anymore, not even newsreaders. One of their assigned duties used to be to speak the language proplerly.
Why is Switzerland and the US female and most other countries gender neutral or dont have a gender assigned.
You would say: “Die Schweiz” as in “Ich fahre in die Schweiz” but not “Die Deutschland” or das Frankreich but you would say “das Frankenreich”
So why is it Die Schweiz when America and the UK have gender, das Vereinigte Königreich (neutral) and die Vereinigte Staaten(female)?
Maybe because of the figure of “Helvetia” (a woman) or because it is ‘die Eidgenossenshaft’ in Switzerland, and ‘der Bund’ in case of Germany?. I guess US is not really female, it is just plural, no?
p.d. in any case, in the suuuuper boring national hymn, Switzerland is referred to as ‘vaterland’ (fatherland).
The US (united states of America) is plural hence die. Likewise the Nether-lands, the Philippines (probably from Philippine Islands), the Bahamas (from said group of islands), etc.
It’s das Reich, so it’s das Vereinigte Königreich (UK).
Die Schweiz probably got the gender from Konföderation (Confoederatio Helvetica).