German grammar

German grammar

This page outlines the grammar of the German language.

Grammar

Genders

In German all of the three genders of the Proto-Indo-European language have survived. The three genders are masculine ("männlich/Maskulinum"), feminine ("weiblich/Femininum") and neuter ("sächlich/Neutrum"). Unlike English, the gender of a German noun and the sex of the thing to which the noun refers often differ. For example, in German, a stone "(der Stein)" is masculine. Words that describe a male or a female, such as woman "(die Frau)" or man "(der Mann)", generally take the grammatical gender corresponding to their sex, with the notable exceptions of "girl" ("das Mädchen") and young woman ("das Fräulein"), as every noun ending with "-chen" or "-lein" is neuter. On the other hand, the gender of words that do not describe a male or a female, which are all neuter in English, is apparently random. The arbitrary nature of grammatical gender can be seen in the example of three common pieces of cutlery: "knife" "(das Messer)" is a neuter word, "fork" "(die Gabel)" is feminine, and "spoon" "(der Löffel)" is masculine. Students of German are often advised to learn German nouns with their accompanying definite article (equivalent of the word "the") since the gender can be easily recognised through the article. It must also be said that the ending of a noun often strongly suggests the gender. For instance, if a noun ends in "–e", it is likely that it is feminine, although this is not a universal rule.

eg: "die Katze" (the cat), "die Blume" (the flower), "die Liebe" (the love) - but: "der Bote" (the delivery boy).

Nouns ending in the following suffixes: -heit, -keit, -tät, -ung, -ik, -schaft, are also feminine.

eg: "eine Freiheit" (a freedom), "eine Zeitung" (a newspaper), "eine Freundschaft" (a friendship)

Cases

General

Unlike English, which has lost almost all forms of declension of nouns and adjectives, German still inflects nouns, adjectives and pronouns into four grammatical cases. The cases are the nominative (Nominativ), genitive (Genitiv), dative (Dativ), and accusative (Akkusativ). The case of a particular noun depends on the grammatical function of the noun in the sentence.
* Nominative ("Wer?"): The subject of a sentence, the thing doing the action
* Genitive ("Wessen?"): The possessor of something, or the object of certain other prepositions.
* Dative ("Wem?"): The indirect object, as in when an object is given to someone, or the object of certain other prepositions
* Accusative ("Wen?"): The direct object, the thing which is directly receiving the action, or the object of certain prepositions

:Example: der Tisch ("engl." the table)::

Plurals

The German language has twelve different ways of forming the plural. A student of German as a foreign language must learn the plural for each new noun learned; although a great many feminine nouns are very regular in the formation of the plural, many masculine and neuter nouns are not. For example, some plurals are formed with an "n", some with "en", some with an umlaut and an "e" or an umlaut and an "en", other plurals are the same as the singular, some add "er" or an umlaut and "er", etc.

Nominal (or noun) phrases

(The content of this section is not yet applicable for proper names.)

A German nominal phrase, in general, consists of the following components in the following order:

article, number (cardinal or ordinal), adjective(s), noun, genitive attribute, position(s), relative clause reflexive pronoun

* "Die dritte umwerfende Vorstellung des Schillerdramas in dieser Woche in Hamburg"("the third stunning performance of the drama by Schiller this week in Hamburg")

Of course, most noun phrases are not this complicated; adjectives, numbers, genitive attributes, positions, relative clauses and emphasizers are always optional.

A nominal phrase contains at least a cardinal number, an adjective, a pronoun, or a noun. It always has an article, except if it is an indefinite plural noun or refers to an uncountable mass.

* "Die Drei" ("the three of them")
* "Der große Mann" ("the tall man")
* "Der Mann" ("the man")

If the noun is uncountable, an article is not used; otherwise, the meaning of the sentence changes.

* "Ich kaufe billiges Bier" ("I buy cheap beer")
* "Ich kaufe ein billiges Bier" ("I buy a bottle/can/glass/... of cheap beer")
* "Ich habe Geld" ("I have money")
* "Ich habe das Geld" ("I have the money") or ("I have enough money to...")

A nominal phrase can be regarded a single unit. It has a case, a number, and a gender. Case and number depend on the context, whereas the gender is determined by the main noun.

Genitive attribute

A nominal phrase may have a "genitive attribute", for example to express possession. This attribute may be seen as merely another nominal phrase in the genitive case which may hang off another nominal phrase.

* "Der Beruf des alten Mannes" ("The profession of the old man.")
* "Die Hütte des Häuptlings des Stammes" ("The hut of the chief of the tribe"):: (genitive phrase has its own genitive phrase). This is uncommon in modern German. "Die Hütte des Stammeshäuptlings" ("The hut of the tribe's chief") is preferred.

A direct translation of "Der Beruf des alten Mannes" would be "the profession of the old man.""The old man's professions" could be translated directly and correct as "Des alten Mannes Beruf", though this form is almost never used in modern German.

In early high German, the genitive attribute can consist of a personal pronoun in its genitive case. In modern German, this is no longer used; the corresponding possessive pronoun is used instead.

:OLD: "Die Gnade seiner" ("his grace"):NEW: "Seine Gnade"

Position

A nominal phrase may contain a "position phrase"; this may be seen as merely another nominal phrase with a preposition (or postposition) or a pronominal adverb ("See" Adverbial phrases).

* "Eine Wolke am Himmel" ("a cloud in the sky")
* "Der Bundeskanzler während des Bürgerkriegs im Kongo" ("the Chancellor during the civil war in the Congo"):: (position phrase has its own position phrase)
*"Der Regen im Dschungel im Sommer" ("the rain in the jungle in the summer"):: (Several position phrases)
*"Der Berg dort" ("that mountain over there")

Extended attribute phrase

Unlike English, German permits lengthy nominal modifiers such as

"Der während des Bürgerkrieges amtierende Premierminister" ("The acting Prime Minister during the civil war", literally:"the during the civil war holding-office prime minister") or "Die noch zu Anfang des Kurses relativ kleinen, aber doch merklichen Verständigungsschwierigkeiten" (literally: "The still at the beginning of the course relatively small but nevertheless noticeable difficulties in communication").

These are a feature of written (particularly educated) German. One hears them in the context of formal oral communications as well (such as news broadcasts, speeches, etc.).

Relative clause

A nominal phrase will often have a relative clause.

Aside from their highly inflected forms, German relative pronouns are less complicated than English. There are two varieties. The more common one is based on the definite article "der", "die", "das", but with distinctive forms in the genitive ("dessen", "deren") and in the dative plural ("denen"). Historically this is related to English "that". The second, which is more literary and used for emphasis, is the relative use of "welcher", "welche", "welches", comparable with English "which". As in most Germanic languages, including Old English, both of these inflect according to gender, case and number. They take their gender and number from the noun they modify, but the case from their function in their own clause.

:"Das Haus, in dem ich wohne, ist sehr alt."::The house in which I live is very old.

The relative pronoun "dem" is neuter singular to agree with "Haus", but dative because it follows a preposition in its own clause. On the same basis, it would be possible to substitute the pronoun "welchem".

However, German uses the uninflecting "was" ('what') as a relative pronoun when the antecedent is "alles", "etwas" or "nichts" ('everything', 'something', 'nothing'.).

:"Alles, was Jack macht, gelingt ihm."::Everything that Jack does is a success.

In German, all relative clauses are marked with commas.

Nouns

A German noun has one of three specific grammatical genders (masculine, feminine, neuter) and belongs to one of three declensions. These features remain unaltered by inflection but must be considered in this process. The grammatical gender influences articles, adjectives and pronouns. Note that gender and sex differ in many cases, as mentioned above.

Number (singular, plural) and case (nominative, accusative, dative, genitive) must be taken into account in the process of declension.

The declension can be more difficult than in other languages such as Latin; not only the word ending, but also the root may be altered by inflecting.

Articles and article-like words

Articles have a feature called "strength", which influences the declension of the adjectives. There are strong articles, weak articles, and articles that have strong and weak cases. Sometimes this feature is not constant in daily use.

The inflected forms depend on the number, the case and the gender of the corresponding noun. Articles have the same plural forms for all three genders.

Cardinal numbers

Cardinal numbers are always placed before any adjectives. If the number is not very high, it is usually not combined with an indefinite plural article like "einige" or "mehrere". Personal pronouns of the first and second person are placed in front of numbers. Personal pronouns of the third person cannot be used with numbers.

:"Drei Hunde" ("three dogs"):"Die vier apokalyptischen Reiter" ("the four horsemen of the Apocalypse"):NOT: "Einige fünf Äpfel" BUT: "Einige Äpfel" or "Fünf Äpfel" ("some apples, five apples"):"Ein paar tausend Euro" ("a couple of thousand euro"):"Wir vier" ("we four")

If you use a cardinal number, you must use the plural form of the nominal phrase, in contrast to languages like Turkish.

:NOT: "Zehn Pferd" (turk. "On At"):BUT: "Zehn Pferde" ("ten horses"):EXCEPTION: "Zehn Bier", "Zehn Biere" (both possible in some cases like drinks. Though grammatically wrong, almost always the former is used.)

Whereas there is a cardinal number meaning "one" in English, Germans use the indefinite article instead. The difference is expressed by the intonation.

:"Ein rotes Buch" can mean::"a red book" - ein rotes "Buch"; or::"one red book" - "ein" rotes Buch

The numbers "zwei" (two) and "drei" (three) have endings for case in some cases. Where an adjective would have weak endings, numbers don't have endings. If an adjective had strong endings, these numbers may also have strong endings in the genitive case:"das Haus zweier junger Frauen" ("two young women's house")

If there is no other word carrying the strong ending of the genitive plural, the numbers must carry it.:"die Reise dreier Schwestern" ("three sisters' voyage")

If these numbers are centre of a nominal phrase in the dative plural and no other word carries case markers, they may carry dative endings.:"Ich habe zweien Bananen gegeben" ("I've given bananas to two (of them)")(old pronunciation)

Special case for 'eins' in German: It can be represented as : "eins", "eine", "einer", "eines", "einem" or "einen" depending on the sentence. This is because in German, 'eins' means one, while 'ein' (as in "Das ist ein Buch") is the German equivalent of the English word "a" ("This is a book").

Adjectives

To correctly agree German adjectives, the case, number and gender of the nominal phrase must be considered along with the article of the noun. German adjectives normally go before the noun which they are changing. German adjectives have an ending before the noun. The ending is normally the letter "-e" in the singular form and "-en" in the plural form.

Like articles, adjectives use the same plural endings for all three genders.

:"Ein lauter Krach" ("a loud noise"):"Der laute Krach" ("the loud noise"):"Der große, schöne Mond" ("the big, beautiful moon")

Participles may be used as adjectives and are treated in the same way.

In contrast to Romance languages, adjectives are only declined in the attributive position (that is, when used in nominal phrases to describe a noun directly). Predicative adjectives, separated from the noun by "to be", for example, are not declined and are indistinguishable from adverbs.

:NOT: "Die Musik ist laute" BUT "Die Musik ist laut" ("(the) music is loud")

There are three degrees of comparison: positive form, comparative form and superlative form. In contrast to Latin or Italian, there is no grammatical feature for the absolute superlative (elative).

Pronouns

German pronouns of the first person refer to the speaker; those of the second person refer to an addressed person. The pronouns of the third person may be used to replace nominal phrases. These have the same gender, number and case as the original nominal phrase. This goes for other pronouns, too.

pronoun [position(s)] [relative clause]

Personal pronouns

Adverbial phrases

Verbs

German verbs may be classified as either "weak", with a dental consonant inflection, or "strong", showing a vowel gradation (ablaut). Both of these are regular systems. Most verbs of both types are regular, though various subgroups and anomalies do arise. The only completely irregular verb in the language is "sein" ("to be"). However, textbooks for foreign learners often class all strong verbs as irregular. There are fewer than 200 strong and irregular verbs, and there is a gradual tendency for strong verbs to become weak.

Modal particles

Modal particles ("Abtönungspartikel") are a part of speech used frequently in spoken German. These words affect the tone of a sentence instead of conveying a specific literal meaning. Typical examples of this kind of word in German are "doch", "mal", "halt", "eben", "nun", "schon", "eh" or "ja". Many of these words also have a more basic, specific meaning (e.g. "ja" "yes", "schon" "already"), but in their modal use this meaning is not directly expressed.

Sentences

German sentence structure is somewhat more complex than in other languages, with phrases regularly inverted for both questions and subordinate phrases.

References

* Wietusch, Gudrun, "Grundkurs Grammatik" Cornelson (2006) ISBN 978-3464618059

External links

* [http://www.canoo.net/services/OnlineGrammar/Wort/Ueberblick/index.html?lang=en www.canoo.net] – Comprehensive German grammar in English
* [http://www.deutschseite.de/ German Grammar] – Toms Deutschseite - German grammar explained by a native speaker (in English)


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