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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.
A well-known example is the Kommerzialrat (Prussia: Kommerzienrat) ("Commercial Counsellor [implied: to the Court]), which denotes an entitled businessman. In the monarchies, there also was an "augmented" form of that, in this case Geheimer Kommerzialrat , generally received by adding the adjective "Geheim" (see Geheimrat ).
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 ...
For example, English uses a possessive clitic, 's; a preposition, of; and adjectives, my, your, his, her, etc. Predicates denoting possession may be formed either by using a verb (such as the English have) or by other means, such as existential clauses (as is usual in languages such as Russian). Some languages have more than two possessive classes.
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.
Possessive determiners, as used in English and some other languages, imply the definite article.For example, my car implies the car of mine. (However, "This is the car I have" implies that it is the only car you have, whereas "This is my car" does not imply that to the same extent.
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 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.