Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
German pronouns are German words that function as pronouns. As with pronouns in other languages, they are frequently employed as the subject or object of a clause, acting as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases , but are also used in relative clauses to relate the main clause to a subordinate one.
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 personal pronouns of many languages correspond to both a set of possessive determiners and a set of possessive pronouns.For example, the English personal pronouns I, you, he, she, it, we and they correspond to the possessive determiners my, your, his, her, its, our and their and also to the (substantive) possessive pronouns mine, yours, his, hers, its (rare), ours and theirs.
Old High German is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, and adjectives must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. There are five grammatical cases in Old High German.
Some authors who classify both sets of words as "possessive pronouns" or "genitive pronouns" apply the terms dependent/independent [7] or weak/strong [8] to refer, respectively, to my, your, etc., and mine, yours, etc. For example, under that scheme, my is termed a dependent possessive pronoun and mine an independent possessive pronoun.
Many loanwords from English adopt the gender of their native German equivalent; the gender of other loanwords may be deduced by the word's form or ending. For example, nouns from English - ing forms are neuter when referring to actions, but masculine when not referring to actions e.g. der Looping , 'loop' esp. in context of a rollercoaster.
However, most modern Germanic languages, including Dutch and German, have a more restrictive word order known as V2 word order, in which the finite verb, whether it is an auxiliary or not, is always placed second in main clauses (however not in Dutch and German subordinate clauses).