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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 ...
In linguistics, declension (verb: to decline) is the changing of the form of a word, generally to express its syntactic function in the sentence, by way of some inflection. Declensions may apply to nouns , pronouns , adjectives , adverbs , and determiners .
German articles are used similarly to the English articles, a and the. However, they are declined differently according to the number , gender and case of their nouns. Declension
For example, Hund (dog) is a masculine (der) word, so the article changes when used in the accusative case: Ich habe einen Hund. (lit., I have a dog.) In the sentence, "a dog" is in the accusative case as it is the second idea (the object) of the sentence. Some German pronouns also change in the accusative case.
This declension counterparts the vowel stems of the third declension (is) of Latin, and the third declension of Greek. It contains masculine and feminine nouns. Note that masculine nouns have become identical to -a stem nouns in the singular, while feminine nouns have preserved the original declension.
There are also strong and weak declensions of German adjectives. This differs from the situation in nouns and verbs in that every adjective can be declined using either the strong or the weak declension. As with the nouns, weak in this case means the declension in -n. In this context, the terms "strong" and "weak" seem particularly appropriate ...
The grammar of the German language is quite similar to that of the other Germanic languages.Although some features of German grammar, such as the formation of some of the verb forms, resemble those of English, German grammar differs from that of English in that it has, among other things, cases and gender in nouns and a strict verb-second word order in main clauses.
The example sentence only works with nouns, articles, or adjectives that have different declension endings for Nominative and Accusative cases. A workaround would be: " Der John sieht die Mary" (subject-object) vs. " Den John sieht die Mary" (object-subject), but articles are usually only used with names in southern dialects.