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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.
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 ...
There are also reflexive pronouns for the dative case and the accusative case (reflexive pronouns for the genitive case are possessive pronouns with a "selbst" following after them). In the first and second person, they are the same as the normal pronouns, but they only become visible in the third person singular and plural.
The gender matches the receiver's gender (not the object's gender) for the dative case, and the owner's gender for the genitive. Dative: Ich gebe die Karten dem Mann – I give the cards to the man. Genitive: Die Entwicklung unseres Dorfes – The growth of our village. For further details as to the usage of German cases, see German grammar.
In German, grammatical case is largely preserved in the articles and adjectives, but nouns have lost many of their original endings. Below is an example of case inflection in German using the masculine definite article and one of the German words for "sailor".
In languages that have a genitive case, the genitive form of a noun may sometimes be used as a possessive (as in German Karls Haus "Karl's house"). Languages such as Japanese and Chinese form possessive constructions with nouns using possessive particles, in the same way as described for pronouns above.
The locative case had merged into the dative case, and the ablative may have merged with either the genitive, dative or instrumental cases. However, sparse remnants of the earlier locative and ablative cases are visible in a few pronominal and adverbial forms, and in some instances the case forms of certain noun classes use the older locative ...
Dative case: Ihnen. Declension of polite possessive adjectives: Singular Plural Masculine Feminine Neuter All three genders Nominative case Ihr: ... In German, the ...