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German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. The basic sentence in German follows SVO word order. [1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, [note 1] uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.
German verbs have forms for a range of subjects, indicating number and social status: First-person singular: 'I'; ich; Second-person familiar: 'you' (as used to a friend); du; Second-person familiar: 'you' (as used to a friend); Du (possible form in letters, traditionally used for all kinds of addresses) Second-person polite: 'you'; Sie (with ...
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.
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.
Words for objects without obvious masculine or feminine characteristics like 'bridge' or 'rock' can be masculine or feminine. 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.
The rules of the new spelling concern the following areas: correspondence between sounds and written letters (this includes rules for spelling loan words), capitalisation, joined and separate words, hyphenated spellings, punctuation, and hyphenation at the end of a line. Place names and family names were excluded from the reform.
The East German Duden records the nominalization of German words by adding the suffix-ist, borrowed from the Russian language suffix. Furthermore, additional words were recorded as a result of the increasing number of adverbs and adjectives negated with the prefix un- , such as unernst ("un-serious") and unkonkret ("un-concrete", " irreal ").
Grammatical abbreviations are generally written in full or small caps to visually distinguish them from the translations of lexical words. For instance, capital or small-cap PAST (frequently abbreviated to PST) glosses a grammatical past-tense morpheme, while lower-case 'past' would be a literal translation of a word with that meaning.