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German modal particles (German: Modalpartikel or Abtönungspartikel) are uninflected words that are used mainly in the spontaneous spoken language in colloquial registers in German. Their dual function is to reflect the mood or the attitude of the speaker or the narrator and to highlight the sentence's focus .
A German modal particle serves no necessary syntactical function, but expresses the speaker's attitude towards the utterance. Modal particles include ja, halt, doch, aber, denn, schon and others. Some of these also appear in non-particle forms. Aber, for example, is also the conjunction but.
German declension is the paradigm that German uses to define all the ways articles, adjectives and sometimes nouns can change their form to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—and/or its associated article—instead of ...
German articles and pronouns in the genitive and dative cases directly indicate the actions of owning and giving without needing additional words (indeed, this is their function), which can make German sentences appear confusing to English-speaking learners.
The particles tot and thoe, historically meaning 'at' and related to German zu, are a strong indicator of nobility if combined with van in a surname, such as van Voorst tot Voorst (the prepositions tot and thoe were once used to denote the place of residence of a lord, whereas van referred to the domain whence he derived his title). Note that ...
an academic degree somewhat the equivalent of a Master's degree. In Austria this also gives the right to a honorific of the same name (being addressed as "Herr Magister", "Frau Magistra" etc.); in Germany this is quite unusual. Ingenieur an Austrian honorific for engineers.
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.
Today, German nobility is no longer conferred by the Federal Republic of Germany (1949–present), and constitutionally the descendants of German noble families do not enjoy legal privileges. Hereditary titles are permitted as part of the surname (e.g., the aristocratic particles von and zu ), and these surnames can then be inherited by a ...