# Development of German case system



## mathz

Hi all,

I was wondering if anyone can point me in the direction of further information regarding the origin of the case system used in german; more specifically how it came to be marked on the article, rather than at the end of words, as happens in other decendents of Indo-European, such as slavic or italic. 

My understanding is that cases are post-positions that have become fused, which makes me curious as to how they have come to exist as they do in german.  The reading I've done so far on proto-germanic hasn't englightened me in this area yet. 

Thanks in advance.


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## berndf

German has by and large maintained the original Germanic case system. Old High German had, like Old English, a 5-case system: nominative, genitive, dative, accusative and instrumental. By the end of the first millennium, the instrumental case merged into the dative which had already absorbed the IE locative and ablative cases (as we know them, i.e., from Latin) centuries earlier. English lost its declensional suffixes during the Middle English period except for the genitive _-es _suffix which became the modern _-'s_ possessive marker and the nominative-objective distinction in nouns (he vs. him).

German retained most of the late Old High German 4 case system but lost most noun suffixes, though not all:

Singular:
N:_das Haus_
G:_des Haus_*es
*D:_dem Haus(*e*)_-- Since the early 20th century the dative ending -e is largely confined to frozen constructs like _zu Hause = at home_.
A:_das Haus_
Plural:
N:_die Häuser_
G:_der__ Häuser_
D:_den Häuser*n*_
A:_die Häuser_

It is not true that cases are marked by articles. Textbook usually add articles because the combination of article and noun is less ambiguous than the noun alone.



mathz said:


> My understanding is that cases are post-positions  that have become fused, which makes me curious as to how they have come  to exist as they do in german.


The case system was inherited from PIE (the classical assumption is that PIE had the 8 cases I mentioned before). Germanic languages did not develop them and the Proto-Germanic case ending weren't independent enclitic particles any more.


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## mathz

Hey thanks for your quick reply and examples, though I think I didn't phrased my question very well. 

With regard to case endings being fused post-positions, I mean thats how they are assumed to have come about in Proto-Indo-European originally, not that they were developed afterwards in germanic. 

I'm looking to see how the article system (der den des dem/die die der der etc.), arose. In that, the Indo-European system didn't have them (so far as I know), and that case marked _articles_ seem to be a development within germanic later on.



berndf said:


> It is not true that cases are marked by articles. Textbook usually add  articles because the combination of article and noun is less ambiguous  than the noun alone.



Then I'm really confused   What are the declinations representing in the Der,Den,Des etc. paradigm? If not case?

 Is it that speakers simply began to inflect the articles that developed, according to the same system that applied to nouns and adjectives_?

_Thanks again for your help : )


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## berndf

mathz said:


> I'm looking to see how the article system (der den des dem/die die der der etc.), arose. In that, the Indo-European system didn't have them (so far as I know)


The same way as in Romance and also as in English: out of demonstrative pronouns/adjectives. Example: In Old English, there was the neuter demonstrative pronoun/definite article _þæt_ which became modern English _that_. In German _þat_ became _þaz _(Old High German sound shift)_,_ then _þ _(_=th_) became d: _daz_ and finally the spelling changed to _das_. In modern German you can still use _der/die/das_ as a demonstrative pronoun in the sense of _that_.



mathz said:


> , and that case marked _articles_ seem to be a development within germanic later on.


Absolutely not. The article or demonstratives out of which the articles developed were declined in Greek, Latin, Old English, ... Most Romance and Germanic language still have at least a rudimentary declension system for articles. It is modern English which is the exception having only one form of the definite article (_the_).



mathz said:


> Then I'm really confused   What are the declinations representing in the Der,Den,Des etc. paradigm? If not case?


As I said, articles are essentially demonstrative pronouns which, like adjectives, agree with the all other elements of a noun phrase in case. Let's take an example containing an article, an adjective and a noun: _der kleine Hund_ which means_ the little dog_ or _that little dog_. Now let's use _the little dog_ as a dative object: _he gave food to the little dog_. English does not have a dative case any more and therefore uses the preposition _to_ as somthing you might call a "dative marker". German does not need that preposition but instead converts the entire noun phrase, i.e. each part of it, into dative case. To make that more transparent, I'll use the archaic form with the "dative e" (see my first post): _Er gab de*m* kleine*n* Hund*e* Futter. _As you can see, each of the three words has changed in the process.

In short: _der/des/dem/den_ follows the case of the noun phrase, it does not define or mark the case of the noun phrase.


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## Dan2

mathz said:


> I was wondering if anyone can point me in the  direction of further information regarding the origin of the case system  used in german; more specifically how it came to be marked on the  article, rather than at the end of words, as happens in other decendents  of Indo-European, such as slavic or italic.





berndf said:


> ...No[w] let's use _the little dog_ as a dative object:... German ... converts the entire noun phrase, i.e. each part of it, into dative case. ... _Er gab de*m* kleine*n* Hund*e* Futter. _As you can see, each of the three words has changed in the process.


Just to bring the discussion full-circle: Note, Mathz, that this is just as in Latin and Russian, etc., allowing for the fact that these languages have only the precursors of the articles ("one" and "that"). But as berndf illustrates for German, in  Latin and Russian, for ex., each word in the noun phrase (for ex., _one/that little dog_) is marked for case.

So the difference between Latin and Russian, etc. on the one hand, and German on the other, is one of degree.  The former have complex case-marking of nouns, the latter extremely simple.  Latin and Russian have complex case-marking of "article" and adjective, German somewhat simpler.  But in all of these languages, case has to be viewed as applied to the full noun phrase, both noun and article/demonstrative/adjective elements.

 (If by "Italic" you had French/Italian/Portuguese/Spanish in mind, it is  true that their articles are not marked for case; but then neither are  their nouns, so these languages are not really relevant to the topic as you posed it.  And note, interestingly, that their articles _are_ still marked for number and gender.)


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## CapnPrep

Dan2 said:


> So the difference between Latin and Russian, etc. on the one hand, and German on the other, is one of degree.  The former have complex case-marking of nouns, the latter extremely simple.  Latin and Russian have complex case-marking of "article" and adjective, German somewhat simpler.  But in all of these languages, case has to be viewed as applied to the full noun phrase, both noun and article/demonstrative/adjective elements.


I agree with this, but the two statements — (1) abstract case is a property of the entire noun phrase, (2) distinctive case inflection appears to varying degrees on the words that make up the noun phrase — are not incompatible, and both require explanation. Actually, there's not much to explain about (1): abstract case is mostly just a theoretical postulate (a well-established and useful one, but still).

All of the fun details are in (2), and this is what mathz was asking about for German. As berndf has already demonstrated, it is not true that case "came to be marked on the article, rather than at the end of words" in German, and I think that mathz would concede that this was an oversimplification. But there is an unequal division of labor in the German noun phrase: the article _typically_ carries more distinctive case marking than the noun, even though historically, both parts of the noun phrase had more or less equally complex declensional paradigms.

How this situation evolved seems to me to be a valid question for discussion, although it doesn't strike me as particularly surprising, given that (1) grammatical elements like articles and pronouns tend to maintain distinct forms more robustly than open-class elements [here again, one can ask "why?"], and (2) multiple marking of case on every member of the noun phrase represents a functional burden that speakers will try to eliminate, if they can get away with it.


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## mathz

@CapnPrep

Hey thanks, I think you've understood and expressed what I was attempting to get at. My use of strict terminology isn't quite up to sctratch. 

Since Indo-European reconstruction seems to have case marked on nouns, rather than on definite/indefinite articles  (and these being lacking in certain daughter languages, Slavic, Latin etc), I was looking to see how or a which point these articles begin to emerge and decline in either Proto-Germanic, or specifally german. As it seems of note that other branches of Indo-European didn't develope this way. 

As a side note now: 





berndf said:


> In short: der/des/dem/den follows the case of the noun phrase, it does not define or mark the case of the noun phrase.


Could you tell me the difference between a lexical item (in this example definite afticles) marking for case, versus it simply agreeing with the case of a noun phrase? To me and my limited knowledge they appear to be the same thing. And especially in German, since as the declination of noun is reduced,  case is not explicit unless revealed by the article? Surely since the article is the only part that is morphing in certain examples, it must be marking case?

Again, thank for your replies and explanations, most appreciated.


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## CapnPrep

mathz said:


> Since Indo-European reconstruction seems to have case marked on nouns, rather than on definite/indefinite articles  (and these being lacking in certain daughter languages, slavic, latin etc), I was looking to see how or a which point these articles begin to emerge and decline in either proto-germanic, or specifally german. As it seems of note that other branches of Indo-European didn't develope this way.


As berndf explained, the articles in German (and other branches of IE) evolved from demonstratives and other pronominal elements that already existed in PIE and had full case paradigms. See the table here, for example, for the PIE and PGmc reconstructions and later Germanic forms. You can find information about PGmc nominal and adjectival declensions on the same page, with comparisons to later attested forms. The following points can be made about noun phrases of the form [Demonstrative (> Article) + Noun] (leaving adjectives aside for now):

Both parts of the noun phrase carried highly distinctive case marking in PIE and in early Germanic.
The case paradigms of both parts of the noun phrase have become simplified significantly in the evolution of the modern Germanic languages.
The demonstrative/article has retained more of its case paradigm than the noun in modern German, but German nouns continue to take overt case marking in many contexts.
Most of the surviving case forms (of both articles and nouns) are syncretic — i.e. ambiguous — and the case of many German noun phrases can only be determined by examining the morphology of _both_ parts. Often, even this is not enough, and one can only be sure of the case by looking at the syntactic context.


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## berndf

mathz said:


> Hey thanks, I think you've understood and expressed what I was attempting to get at. My use of strict terminology isn't quite up to sctratch.
> 
> Since Indo-European reconstruction seems to have case marked on nouns, rather than on definite/indefinite articles  (and these being lacking in certain daughter languages, slavic, latin etc)


That is not correct.

Adjectives and pronouns were always declined (not only for case but also for number and gender). Let's take Latin
Nominative: _*That* man sees me = *ille* vir me videt,
_Accusative: _I see *that* man = *illum* virum video._

Your confusion seems to be that you understand the definite article as a completely new thing which suddenly appeared. Articles originally all meant "that". In those languages which developed the concept of a definite article, the meanings "that" and "the" *gradually* differentiated. German is still at that stage. _Das Haus _can mean both _the Haus_ and _that Haus_. Sometimes you can differentiate the two meaning only by stress: _das *Haus* = the house; *das* Haus = that house_.



mathz said:


> Could you tell me the difference between a lexical item (in this example  definite afticles) marking for case, versus it simply agreeing with the  case of a noun phrase? To me and my limited knowledge they appear to be  the same thing. And especially in german, since as the declination of  noun is reduced,  case is not explicit unless revealed by the article?  Surely since the article is the only part that is morphing in certain  examples, it must be marking case?


After all, articles have a different purpose. Their purpose is to mark definiteness. Like all constituents of a noun phrase it is *also* case marked. Case marking is the job of all constituents of a noun phrase. Let's take an example without article:
Accusative: _Er hat groß*es* Glück = He was very lucky_ (literally:_ He has great luck_). 
Dative: _Die verdankt er groß*em* Glück = This he ows to great luck_.
In this case the adjective (_groß*=*big/great_) carries the disambiguating suffix.
And sometimes you have bad luck and there is not differentiating case marker at all:
Nominative: _G__roß*es* Glück wurde ihm zuteil = G__reat luck happened to him_. 
Accusative: _Er hat groß*es* Glück = He was very lucky_ (literally:_ He has great luck_). 


Why am I insisting on all this? Your original question was:


mathz said:


> ...makes me curious as to how they have come to exist as they do in German.


The point is: Nothing "came into existence" in German. German simply never abolished case marking; that's all. The logic of German case marking still is as it always has been since Proto-Indo-European times. It is English which has changed.


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## mathz

Hey, thanks, I'm not doubting that English hasn't changed, I'm aware of its lack of morphology compared to Old English and proto Germanic.  Again I may have been unclear, I'm talking about the singular definite article ("the" and it's counterparts in german), not pronouns, not plurals, not demonstratives  not adjectives, as I see that these exist in other case marked languages of IE descent.

I understand that semantic drift lead to demonstatives becoming definite articles .. that >the ... Since IE didn't have singular definite articles, they are a development in proto-germanic, so I was just looking for any particular history or ideas as to how their declination developed.


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## berndf

mathz said:


> Again I may have been unclear, I'm talking about the singular definite article ("the" and it's counterparts in german), not pronouns, not plurals, not demonstratives  not adjectives, as I see that these exist in other case marked languages of IE descent.


You have been clear. What we tried to explain is that from the point of view of the German declension system there is no difference what so ever between a definite article and a demonstrative pronoun (with one exception in the genitive case but explaining that would go too far for the purpose of this thread). The difference is only semantic interpretation.



mathz said:


> ...so I was just looking for any particular history or ideas as to how their declination developed.


Again our point was you asked the wrong question: in German, the declension of articles did not develop at all. The demonstrative pronoun and the definite article are still morphologically the same. In English the two differentiated when gender marking was lost: _the_ was originally (late OE) the masculine and _that_ the neuter declension of the same word.


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## Walshie79

I think what the OP is asking is why in German the case is overwhelmingly marked on the article rather than the associated noun; ie there are more distinct articles (das, des, die, den, dem, der) than noun endings (Haus, Hauser, Hauses, Hausern). 



> It is not true that cases are marked by articles. Textbook usually add  articles because the combination of article and noun is less ambiguous  than the noun alone.



Does that mean it is possible to speak/write grammatically correct German without articles? That is normal in Latin, and certainly possible in Old English- but I'd have thought German doesn't have enough distinct endings on the noun to make the cases/morphology and thus meaning clear. This takes me back to my schooldays; I was exposed to Latin a good 2-3 years before German, and more or less got the hang of Latin cases; when I took my first German lessons I was assured that anyone who had already done Latin wouldn't have any problem with German grammar. Wrong! There are (as good as) no articles in Latin. Ille/illa/illud yes, but that's the demonstrative in Latin, not the definite article as it has become in French/Spanish etc. There was never the problem of remembering the gender and case of an extra word to make a simple sentence like in German. 

The loss of all these different articles was almost certainly the reason gender was lost in English, even though noun inflection hasn't been completely (the plural and genitive -s, the occasional -en plural). I often wonder whether "it's cold in _them there_ hills" originated with Middle English speakers who knew that was a dative, but weren't sure what gender it should be- _them (_OE_ thaem) _was the masculine and neuter dative article, _there_ _(__thaere)_ the feminine.


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## berndf

Walshie79 said:


> I think what the OP is asking is why in German the case is overwhelmingly marked on the article rather than the associated noun; ie there are more distinct articles (das, des, die, den, dem, der) than noun endings (Haus, Hauser, Hauses, Hausern).


Restated like this, the question is valid and has been answered by CapnPrep in #6. In my words: The use of existing determiners with existing morphological structures as articles the use of these determiners has become more frequent. In addition, as a result of less flexible word orders, the function of declensional agreement to identify which words (determiner, adjective and nouns) belong to a single noun phrase has become less important. These two factors together meant that redundancy increased in the declension system. And as CapnPrep wrote: _multiple marking of case on every member of the noun phrase represents a functional burden that speakers will try to eliminate, if they can get away with it._


Walshie79 said:


> Does that mean it is possible to speak/write grammatically correct German without articles?


C'mon, I never said that.


Walshie79 said:


> There are (as good as) no articles in Latin. Ille/illa/illud yes, but that's the demonstrative in Latin, not the definite article as it has become in French/Spanish etc.


As in German, Romance definite articles are in essence nothing else than inflated use of this demonstrative. In late Latins text you can observe this gradual shift (see here).


Walshie79 said:


> The loss of all these different articles was almost certainly the reason gender was lost in English


The loss of the declension system (except for number) is certainly the reason why the definite article is not declined any more in English. The only remaining declension (m. and f.: _the_, n: _that_) was later used to differentiate use as an article from demonstrative uses. The use of all declensional forms, _þe _(m)_, þeo _(f) and _þat _(n)_,_ as demonstrative pronouns can be found up to the 14th century in ME texts* when grammatical gender was already lost.



Walshie79 said:


> I often wonder whether "it's cold in _them there_ hills" originated with Middle English speakers who knew that was a dative


The his genitive (dative+possessive pronoun) is attested in English only during the early modern English period when dative suffixes had already decayed. But it is quite possible that there existed dialectal forms before which simply aren't recorded. The form is so frequent in dialectal High German, is the standard in modern Low German and is so frequent in colloquial Dutch that there might well have been an underlying form in common West Germanic. On the other hand, the timing of its emergence in the 16th century (when the proper genitive decayed in Low German) could also be due to Dutch and Low German influence through maritime trade links in the North Sea region.

______________________________
* See here, containing various attestations. Note especially: _thē (pron.(1)) Also (early SWM or SW, *chiefly fem.*) þeo_


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## Walshie79

berndf said:


> The his genitive (dative+possessive pronoun) is attested in English only during the early modern English period when dative suffixes had already decayed. But it is quite possible that there existed dialectal forms before which simply aren't recorded. The form is so frequent in dialectal High German, is the standard in modern Low German and is so frequent in colloquial Dutch that there might well have been an underlying form in common West Germanic. On the other hand, the timing of its emergence in the 16th century (when the proper genitive decayed in Low German) could also be due to Dutch and Low German influence through maritime trade links in the North Sea region.



The "his-genitive" (_John his book, the wyf of Bathe hire tale)_ certainly existed in English, but it's a different construction to what I was suggesting. I wonder whether the "in _them there_" that you sometimes hear in modern English contains the two dative articles of Old English/early Middle English, not the pronoun _them_and demonstrative _there_.

 Who knows, perhaps the very common (but hated by King's English purists) use of _them_ instead of _those _actually contains a definite article in the dative case as well, not the (imported) 3rd-person plural pronoun as its detractors believe. It can even appear in the nominative, eg_ them people watched me_; just as many dialects use _her _in the nominative.
______________________________


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## clevermizo

Walshie79 said:


> The "his-genitive" (_John his book, the wyf of Bathe hire tale)_ certainly existed in English, but it's a different construction to what I was suggesting. I wonder whether the "in _them there_" that you sometimes hear in modern English contains the two dative articles of Old English/early Middle English, not the pronoun _them_and demonstrative _there_.



I really think _there_ is "over there" vs. "them here" or "these here." It's just a way of adding distance-from-the-speaker into the modifier. Just like in Spanish you have _este,ese,aquel_. "There" serves this purpose in these dialectal variants.

For example, "bring me them there books" just adds the information that the books are closer to the listener than to the speaker, or perhaps further from them both.

However, whether _them_ is a preservation of a different inflected form of demonstrative from Old English (and different from the "they/them" pronoun) is a good question, I think. I wonder if this is the case?


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## Alxmrphi

> I really think _there_ is "over there" vs. "them here" or "these  here." It's just a way of adding distance-from-the-speaker into the  modifier. Just like in Spanish you have _este,ese,aquel_.


Yeah, that's a deictic locative adverb, not really a dative article.


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## CapnPrep

Walshie79 said:


> I often wonder whether "it's cold in _them there_ hills" originated with Middle English speakers who knew that was a dative, but weren't sure what gender it should be- _them (_OE_ thaem) _was the masculine and neuter dative article, _there_ _(__thaere)_ the feminine.


It's a cute idea but it seems pretty far-fetched to me. When speakers start to lose their grasp of a grammatical distinction (here, gender), they settle on one form or the other, or some intermediate form arises. I don't know of any cases where both forms would be produced in juxtaposition like this and become a regular part of the grammar.

Furthermore, the only context you would get _them there_ is in the dative singular, so you would have to explain how/why this combination spread to all cases in the plural, while it stopped being used in the singular. Actually, you would need to show that this is indeed what happened in the first place, and I don't think that will be possible.


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## Alxmrphi

> It's a cute idea but it seems pretty far-fetched to me. When speakers  start to lose their grasp of a grammatical distinction (here, gender),  they settle on one form or the other, or some intermediate form arises. I  don't know of any cases where both forms would be produced in  juxtaposition like this and become a regular part of the grammar.



I know it wouldn't exactly be 'regular', but what about the 2, 20 connection in our numbering system?
We have the unit 'two' which is from the neuter declension of the numeral, alongside how we form two-ten, three-ten, four-ten where the 'twen' is taken from the masculine declension of the word (and the 'ty' being a corruption of 'ten'). Is that the kind of both forms alongside each other you were imagining?


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## berndf

The "it's cold in _them there_ hills" business is if at all only vaguely related to the topic of the tread. We should end this side discussion now.


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## Walshie79

I admit the "them there" thing is off topic for German declension, but as CapnPrep can't receive PMs I'll just mention that there were two competing dative articles in early Middle English, _them/n_ and _ther_ which have left traces in surnames such as _Nash_ (_at them/n ash) _and _Ray/Rae/Rea _(_at ther ay/ea _"river") as well as many placenames. Whether they were masc/fem, sing/plural or both, while being undeniably dative, was probably very confusing to the poor 12/13th century peasant who I like to imagine invented "them there"


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## berndf

Just to avoid misunderstanding the history of the loss of the declensions of the OE/ME demostrative pronoun/article is on topic as the OP asked to compare the development in German with that in related languages. Just a prolonged discussion about ModE "them there" would lead us away from the topic.



Walshie79 said:


> ...there were two competing dative articles in early Middle English, _them/n_ and _ther_ ...


They weren't really competing. _Them/n_ was m&n singular and all genders plural while _ther_ was f singular. Compare German dative forms: _dem_ m&n sg, _der_ f sg and _den_ all pl.


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