- Is this cheese half-fat?
- It said it was.
- The cheese can talk?!
It is quite normal, in English, to refer to something as 'saying' something when in fact there is merely something printed on it. Hence:
- The letter said that Barnaby was in Cuba
- The book sang Chomsky's praises
- The newspaper railed against tie salesmen
- The report said the girls had achieved more
- The instructions said not to overload the input receptacle
These are perfectly acceptable sentences: they don't just belong in fantasy worlds that consist of talking letters, singing books, ranting newspapers and pieces of paper that give helpful advice. All of these examples, however, refer to things that are intended to contain printed material. Other things, like cheese, are more dubious: "?The cheese said it was half-fat". English speakers are more likely to say "It said it was half-fat [on the cheese]". The 'confusion' in my original dialogue arises from analysing "it" as the cheese rather than the impersonal "it" of the construction "It said [on the thing] that..."
In German, you cannot use the verb 'to say' (sagen) to refer to that which is printed on something; instead you say that something "stands" somewhere, e.g. Im Bericht steht, die Mädchen hätten mehr geleistet (The report says the girls achieved more).
