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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 ...
The terms "strong" and "weak" are based on the later development of these declensions in languages such as German and Old English, where the strong declensions have more distinct endings. In the proto-language, as in Gothic , such terms have no relevance.
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.
Inflected languages have a freer word order than modern English, an analytic language in which word order identifies the subject and object. [1] [2] As an example, even though both of the following sentences consist of the same words, the meaning is different: [1] "The dog chased a cat." "A cat chased the dog."
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.
English: Declension of the German definite articles, der, die, and das ("the") This file was derived from: DE-def-art-declensions-en.svg with colors to memorize easily Date
This was a late dialectal development, because the result was not the same in all Germanic languages: word-final ē shortened to a in East and West Germanic but to i in Old Norse, and word-final ō shortened to a in Gothic but to o (probably [o]) in early North and West Germanic, with a later raising to u (the sixth century Salic law still has ...
Words for objects without obvious masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock' can be masculine, feminine, or neuter. German nouns are declined (change form) depending on their grammatical case (their function in a sentence) and whether they are singular or plural. German has four cases: nominative, accusative, dative and genitive.