Why does German still have cases?
How Cases Work in English. One reason why English speakers find the German noun case system challenging is because German makes a distinction between the accusative and the dative that we very rarely have in English. Normally, in English, we combine these 2 cases into the objective case.
Which Germanic languages have cases?
Unlike English, which has lost almost all forms of declension of nouns and adjectives, German inflects nouns, adjectives, articles and pronouns into four grammatical cases. The cases are the nominative (Nominativ, Werfall, 1. Fall), genitive (Genitiv, Wes[sen]fall, 2. Fall), dative (Dativ, Wemfall, 3.
Why is German an inflected language?
German is an inflected language with four cases for nouns, pronouns, and adjectives (nominative, accusative, genitive, dative), three genders (masculine, feminine, neuter), and strong and weak verbs. German is widely studied as a foreign language and is one of the main cultural languages of the Western world.
What is the genitive case in German?
The German genitive case is the case that shows possession and is expressed in English by the possessive “of” or an apostrophe (‘s). The German genitive case is also used with the genitive prepositions and some verb idioms.
How are German cases determined?
1. German Nouns Have Genders
- The nominative case is used for sentence subjects. The subject is the person or thing that does the action.
- The accusative case is for direct objects.
- The dative case is for indirect objects.
- The genitive case is used to express possession.
What makes a language Germanic?
Germanic languages are English’s distant cousins, so to speak. The Germanic family itself has subgroups; English is in the West Germanic branch along with German, Dutch, Afrikaans, and a few others. West Germanic languages all trace back to one parent language. No one knows its name or exactly how it sounded.
How do you form genitive in German?
There are 2 ways to form the genitive in German:
- add an ‘s’ to names or family member terms that come directly in front of the noun they’re modifying.
- use the structure modified noun + determiner (and/or +adjectives) + modifying noun which requires genitive case declensions on the determiner and/or adjective(s)
Is the genitive case still used in German?
The genitive is still being used, especially in more formal contexts. So if you want to learn German beyond a basic level, it is not possible to avoid it.
How does the genitive case work?
The genitive case is a grammatical case for nouns and pronouns. It is most commonly used for showing possession. Typically, forming the genitive case involves adding an apostrophe followed by “s” to the end of a noun.
Is the genitive case still important in German?
While it is true that the genitive case is used less in spoken German, and its frequency even in formal, written German has declined over the last few decades, there are still many situations when mastery of the genitive is important. When you look up a noun in a German dictionary, whether bilingual or German-only, you’ll see two endings indicated.
Why is German so similar to other Germanic languages?
While quite a few people still believe that all Germanic languages evolved from different German dialects, it would be more accurate to say that they are all linguistic siblings. In this case, German isn’t the parent language, but just another offspring of Proto-Germanic. This is why they seem so similar!
Are the West Germanic languages mutually intelligible?
On paper, the West Germanic languages can look extremely similar (especially if you’re comparing Dutch and Afrikaans, but we’ll get to that in a minute). However, just because the words look alike, it doesn’t mean they’re mutually intelligible. For one, German maintains a complicated grammatical case system that most of the others got rid of.
Why are there so many German words that are not in Dutch?
That’s because, for German speakers, many words in Dutch look like incorrectly-spelled German words. For example, the German word finden (to find) is spelled vinden in Dutch. Or the German word Antwort (answer) is spelled antwoord in Dutch. Here are a couple other cognates (along with their English equivalents):