Talk:German declension

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I'd be happy to read about when the nouns get any suffixes (like -s in genitive and -n in plural dative). After all, these belong to the declension, too. (The various forms of the plural need not be treated here, at least not necessarily in the first turn.) Adam78 00:53, 16 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Unsrer/unser, eurer/euer

My Langenscheidt's german dictionary lists the first person plural genitive pronoun and the second person plural genitive pronoun as unser and euer, rather than unsrer and eurer. Could someone verify this? I am a german newb. --Sneftel 04:43, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

I'd opine that 'unser' and 'euer' are possessive, rather than genitive. Therefore, I guess, English is lacking a real equivalent. Correct me, if I'm wrong.

Indeed, for nouns, the possessive is a special case of the genitive. ("des Kaisers neue Kleider" = "The Emperor's New Clothes") However, genitive forms of the personal pronouns are not to be confused with the possessive pronouns or their genitive forms, respectively. ("Er erinnerte sich meiner." old-fashioned for "Er erinnerte sich an mich." = "He remembered me." vs. "die Eltern meiner Mutter" = "my mother's parents" or "the parents of my mother")

Thus I also doubt that the statement

"The English next to the genitive German forms is actually possessive case..."

is true for pronouns. At least I can not think of any German sentence or expression including a personal pronoun in genitive case that becomes a possessive pronoun when translated into English.  –  Korako 09:58, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Ah, that clears it up. My background is from latin, in which the possessive is the genitive. Thanks! --Sneftel 20:05, 4 June 2006 (UTC)

Hi, I'm a native German speaker and I would like to comment that all of the genitive forms of the personal pronouns in the table are incorrect. Indeed, genitive of 'wir' is 'unser', genitive of 'ihr' is 'euer.' Likewise, ich - mein, du - dein, er - sein, sie - ihr, es - sein, sie (pl./formal) - ihr. For example: 'Wessen Kleider sind das? -- Sie sind unser.' 'Wem gehören diese Bücher? -- Sie sind alle mein.' Note however, that the use of the genitive in these cases is old-fashioned. Modern German would say: 'Die Kleider gehören uns.' 'Die Bücher gehören alle mir.' The genitive of these pronouns is not identical to the possessive forms: 'Wessen Kleider sind das? -- Es sind uns(e)re (Kleider).' 'Wem gehören die Bücher? -- Sie sind alle meine (Bücher).' -- alexraasch, 21 July 2007

Your statement that the genitive forms of the personal pronouns were not identical to the possessive forms is actually contradictory to what you said above, e.g. that the genitive of 'ich' was 'mein'. In fact, however, 'mein' is a possessive pronoun with its own accusative (meinen/meine/mein), dative (meinem/meiner/meinem) and genitive forms (meines/meiner/meines). Indeed the genitive forms of personal pronouns are vanishing: "Ich erinnere mich deiner." becomes "Ich erinnere mich an dich." and "deiner wegen" has long ago yielded "deinetwegen" or (wrongly) "wegen dir".

Of course translation cannot be counted on to help us in every case, but it can give us some useful clues: Let's take your example "Sie sind unser.", which means "They are ours.", where 'ours' is obviously still a possessive pronoun, albeit used more like a noun rather than like an adjective.  –  Korako 08:55, 22 July 2007 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to say that your table was totally incorrect but that you should add the forms I mentioned earlier. 'meiner', 'deiner', etc. are the genitive forms of the personal pronouns but when the genitive is used in a possessive meaning (which I think is essentially to it -- '... des Kaisers ...') you also need the other forms. That's also what my examples tried to explain and this is also stated by Sneftel's dictionary. What I meant with that possessive and genitive are not the same simply was meant to confirm your statement that they must not be confused althought spelled the same. -- alexraasch, 22 July 2007

Well, I didn't mean to sound upset, so no reason to be sorry. Debate is a good thing.

Yet I cannot think of an example in which a personal pronoun in genitive case has a possessive meaning, since for that we already have possessive pronouns. Above I tried to make a point on demonstrating that nouns do not behave the same way, so what you say was essential to the genitive is merely essential to nouns. As for Sneftel's dictionary, he only cited two examples, that look more like spelling issues to me.

I think we need to bare in mind that we're only talking about conventions, not about a priori rules here. We could abolish the personal/possessive-distinction and declare that possessive pronouns are only a special case of their personal counterparts. It's intuitive and it works pretty well for English. However, separating the two seems more convenient to me, since we can decline German possessive pronouns (as opposed to English "my", "your"...). If we made the possessive a case, we'd end up with some kind of double-declension.

If you feel that we are going in circles here, feel free to start a German discussion on my talk page, which might be a good thing considering the fact we're both native speakers. (I am not that comfortable about a switch of language on this talk page, though, since here every one should be able to understand us.)  –  Korako 15:44, 23 July 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Inflexions of pronoun 'man'?

What are the infexions of the pronoun 'man'? It seems they've been missed out of the tables. That is, of course, if there are any at all. Perhaps, it is, in the dative, einem/einer/einem/einen and, in the accusative, einen/eine/ein/eine etc? Or do they just avoid it? Tanzeel 15:58, 7 May 2007 (UTC)

I added some information about that subject.

Korako 17:40, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] 2 things

1) I didn't like the description of German as a "conservative langauge" and providing this opinion as justification for the existence of a case system. I would rather a description of what the system actually does rather than whether we think that the system is either 'progressive' or 'conservative'. I have provided a few sentences that flesh out the idea of a case system instead of just quickly introducing the paradigm which would be confusing to a speaker of an uninflected language. 2) The first sentence seemed redundant to me: "German Declensions are the system of Declension in the German language." The term under definition is being defined by its own term. I have reached out to a few more ideas to provide a beginning definition. : sable_de_nuit 17:05, 11 April 2008 (UTC)