# German articles, cases and word order



## justjukka

A little about myself, just in case any of this sounds egocentric:
I'm a linguistics student, and I'm interested in other's thoughts on this theoretical discussion question.  

We're all familiar with this example:
*Der* Hund beißt *den* Mensch.
*Den* Mensch beißt *der* Hund.

Both mean, "The dog bites the man," but we don't have that sort of flexibility with English.  In order to change the positions of the dog and the person in English, we'd need to  make the sentence passive: "The person was bitten by the dog."

The only article we need for that sentence in English is *the*, whereas in German, we need to be conscious of which article to use.

If word order were more rigid in German, would the language only require one definite/indefinite article (such as das/ein)?  Fewer?


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## brian

My opinion: even if over time German word order were to become more rigid, this would not necessitate the collapse of the articles into simply _das/ein_ (or similar).

English word order is quite strict, and yet we still have numerous remnants of things that act redundantly. For example, we don't really need _am_ since _I is_ (or _I are_) is always comprehensible, due to the fact that _I_ is always nominative and so must be the subject of the verb; but it has nonetheless stuck around. Similarly, _this apple_ vs. _these apples_ shows a redundancy for marking number, yet we still can't say _this apples_.

Redundancy is an important part of language because it reduces misunderstanding. When the redundancy is deemed unnecessary by speakers, it may lead to the disappearance of certain features of a language, but this is largely unpredictable.


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## Hutschi

In some cases in German it is not clear what is meant:

Das Krokodil beißt das Mädchen.
Das Mädchen beißt das Krokodil.

In this case it is not clear who bites if you only consider grammar.

There are two way to solve this dilemma for the reader:

1. Context. 
2. Word order.

In "Das Krokodil beißt das Mädchen." it is clear that the crocodile bites - if not special context is given explicitely.

In "Das Mädchen beißt das Krokodil." it is not so clear. In spoken language the word order clarifies who bites. In written language it is prefered to have the same word order as in English to make it clear. Der Beißer beißt den Gebissenen.

As you can see, if the article does not have the information, the word order becomes stricter.


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## Derselbe

There are basically two fundamental ways to define the function of a noun within a sentence. 
The first one is by means of word order (this is what English does and also Chinese as far as I know)
The second one is by means of particles (this is what Germanic languages do - also Japanese uses this approach)

Many languages in the second category lost the particles. They merged into the nouns over time and created declensions. 



> If word order were more rigid in German, would the language only require one definite/indefinite article (such as das/ein)? Fewer?


So in general I'd say yes. Strict word order makes declensions unnecessary and vice versa.


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## berndf

Loss of case inflections and more rigid word order usually go hand in hand, as the history of English or of the Romance languages demonstrate. Which one comes first is a bit of a chicken and egg problem. Looking at the example of English, I should say inflectional loss comes first. The syntax of Middle and Early Modern English still was more flexible than that of Late Modern English though most case endings (except genitive and inconsistent use of the dative _–e_) disappeared already in Middle English.


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## ABBA Stanza

There may also be binding problems with genitives. For example, let's take the sentence:

_Ich gab das Buch dem Freund meiner Schwester._

So far so good . Suppose now, we had a "Neo-Deutsch" (written here in red) with three genders, but no cases. Then the sentence would read:

_Ich gab das Buch der Freund meine Schwester._

But this could now be falsely interpreted as:

_Ich gab das Buch (des Freundes) meiner Schwester._

Having said that, there's some ambiguity in the language anyway, due to not all case/gender declinations being distinct. Hutschi has already introduced an example based on "das" being used in both nominative and accusative cases for neuter objects. Likewise, there can be ambiguities based on "der" being used in both dative and genitive cases for feminine objects. For example:

_Ich gab das Buch der Freundin meiner Schwester._

Should this be interpreted as (blue = direct object, orange = indirect object):

_Ich gab das Buch der Freundin meiner Schwester_, or
_Ich gab das Buch der Freundin meiner Schwester _?

I guess we could reduce confusion by using something like a genitive "s" ending on nouns like in English. So our Neo-Deutsch equivalents could then be something like:

_Ich gab das Buch meine Schwester*s* Freundin._ (in the first case), or
_Ich gab das Freundin*s* Buch meine Schwester._ (in the second).

Good fun, isn't it?!  Of course, one can philosophize for hours on what will most probably never be, but it's nevertheless sometimes interesting to go down theoretical roads like this to get a better feeling as to why declensions are used and how the language works.

Cheers,
Abba


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## Hulalessar

No language can have a grammar that allows (except perhaps now and then) the agent and patient of a sentence to be confused. Accordingly, if a language has moved for one system of distinguishing agents from patients to another, there cannot have been a period when ambiguity reigned; it is all to easy when looking at the history of a language to look upon some phase as transitional and imperfect, when of course at all stages there was a complete and workable system. It would seem therefore that if a language once had free word order but case endings or something similar, but developed so as to lose the cases and acquire strict word order, the word order must have started to become fixed before case endings could be dropped.

It would seem therefore that German cannot lose case indicators unless it first adopts a stricter word order, but adopting a stricter word order would not necessarily mean that the case indicators would go.


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## berndf

ABBA Stanza said:


> There may also be binding problems with genitives. For example, let's take the sentence:
> 
> _Ich gab das Buch dem Freund meiner Schwester._
> 
> So far so good . Suppose now, we had a "Neo-Deutsch" (written here in red) with three genders, but no cases. Then the sentence would read:
> 
> _Ich gab das Buch der Freund meine Schwester._


We don't have to speculate. Many German dialects have already lost (almost) all case inflections, including genitive.

E.g. in Low German you say:
_Ick geev dat book an min Süster ehr Fründ._
_(I gave the book to my sister her friend.)_


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## Frank78

berndf said:


> We don't have to speculate. Many German dialects have already lost (almost) all case inflections, including genitive.
> 
> E.g. in Low German you say:
> _Ick geev dat book an min Süster ehr Fründ._
> _(I gave the book to my sister her friend.)_



Hmh? I´ve never heard any dialect in which all nouns and articles are in nominative case. It would sound so awkward I surely would have recognized that.  I agree that the gentive is on decline but it´s replaced by the dative not the nominative.
I´m not sure if "Low German" qualifies as German dialect. Isn´t it an own language. Probably more closer to Dutch or English than to (High) German.


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## berndf

Frank78 said:


> Hmh? I´ve never heard any dialect in which all nouns and articles are in nominative case. It would sound so awkward I surely would have recognized that.  I agree that the gentive is on decline but it´s replaced by the dative not the nominative.


I said "almost". Low German has three to definite articles, _de_ for masulin, feminin and plural; _dat_ for neuter, and the third, _den_ (which is the almost bit), is for masculin singular accusative.


Frank78 said:


> I´m not sure if "Low German" qualifies as German dialect. Isn´t it an own language. Probably more closer to Dutch or English than to (High) German.


Some call it a language, some a dialect. But I think a majority linguists today would refuse to enter into such a discussion.


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## Frank06

Hi,

Interesting question. But while reading this thread, I have the impression that the words flexible and possible are a bit mixed up.
First of, my (spoken) German isn't that great. So please consider my comments as questions and v.v.



Derselbe said:


> There are basically two fundamental ways to define the function of a noun within a sentence.
> ...
> The second one is by means of particles (this is what Germanic languages do - also Japanese uses this approach)


This _seems_ to suggest that the phrases
1. *Der* Hund beißt *den* Mensch.
2. *Den* Mensch beißt *der* Hund.
are equally common. And here my problem with _flexible_ and _possible_ starts.

And though I am not that familiar with (spoken) German, I wonder if both sentences can be regarded as equally common. Isn't sentence 2 a highly marked and hence uncommon sentence?

I also wonder, in the second case, in how far stress plays a role in spoken German (as an extra marker).

Groetjes,

Frank


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## Hutschi

Stress plays a big role in these sentences:
It marks, for example whether "der" and "den" are common articles (unstressed) or demonstratives (stressed).

Bold means stress:
1. Der Hund beißt den Mensch/Menschen. Den Mensch/Menschen beißt der Hund.   unstressed: "Mensch" is a member of the mankind, not a certain person. "Hund" is a member of "dogs", not a certain dog.
2. *Der* Hund beißt den Mensch/Menschen. Den Mensch/Menschen beißt *der *Hund.
It is a special dog, the dog the speaker points to, or the dog mentioned in the context.
3. Der Hund beißt *den* Mensch/Menschen. *Den *Mensch/Menschen beißt der Hund. It is the person the speaker points to, or the person mentioned in the context.

Next:

Der *Hund *beißt den Menschen. It is the dog who bites, and not the cat, for example.
Der Hund beißt den *Menschen*. The dog bites a/the person and not a cat, for example.

You see, stress modifies the subject and object, but it does not modify who bites and who is bitten.



Frank06 said:


> ...
> 
> This _seems_ to suggest that the phrases
> 1. *Der* Hund beißt *den* Mensch.
> 2. *Den* Mensch beißt *der* Hund.
> are equally common. And here my problem with _flexible_ and _possible_ starts.
> 
> And though I am not that familiar with (spoken) German, I wonder if both sentences can be regarded as equally common. Isn't sentence 2 a highly marked and hence uncommon sentence?




I think, both are seldom in this special case. They are constructed as examples. (This is because they are rather abstract, or vague). 
Common are phrases like:
1. Den Postboten hat ein Hund gebissen
2. Ein Hund hat den Postboten gebissen
In a head line I would prefer "Den Postboten hat ein Hund gebissen" because it is the essential information that it is the "Postbote" and not another person.

1. Eine Bulldogge hat jemanden gebissen.
2. Jemanden hat eine Bulldogge gebissen.
In spoken texts both may occur. In written texts I suppose that the first form is much more common. 

Both kindas of sentences are possible.


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## Derselbe

Frank06 said:


> This _seems_ to suggest that the phrases
> 1. *Der* Hund beißt *den* Mensch.
> 2. *Den* Mensch beißt *der* Hund.
> are equally common. And here my problem with _flexible_ and _possible_ starts.
> 
> And though I am not that familiar with (spoken) German, I wonder if both sentences can be regarded as equally common. Isn't sentence 2 a highly marked and hence uncommon sentence?



You're absolutely right. Since we don't use word order to define object and subject, we can use it to express other things. That's the big advantage of declensions and flection.


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## Sepia

Frank78 said:


> Hmh? I´ve never heard any dialect in which all nouns and articles are in nominative case. It would sound so awkward I surely would have recognized that.  I agree that the gentive is on decline but it´s replaced by the dative not the nominative.
> I´m not sure if "Low German" qualifies as German dialect. Isn´t it an own language. Probably more closer to Dutch or English than to (High) German.


 
It doesn't - it is not a dialect. It is a group of Germanic languages - or at least one language divided in a few dialects. Sort of brings us back to the Question raised in a different tread: Where did the flexions go i the Germanic languages - except in Icelandic and High German. 

Anyway, High German has a very brief history in most regions of Germany.


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## berndf

Sepia said:


> Where did the flexions go i the Germanic languages - except in Icelandic and High German.


Do you mean "where" or "when"? I take it you meant "when". In Middle Low German the Germanic case system was still fully intact, execpt for the instrumental case which was merged into the dative as in Standard German today. So, it must have mapped after about 1600 in the case of Low German when it ceased to be a standard/official language.



Sepia said:


> Anyway, High German has a very brief history in most regions of Germany.


What makes you think that? By definition of the term, High German refers to those West Germanic dialects having undergone the High German sound shift. As far as we know, this sound shift had been comleted in regions south of the "Benrather Line" already in the 8th century.


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## Hutschi

There is a mismatch in definitions.
Hochdeutsch is 1. the High German standard language, this is the usual understanding outside of science (is science here appropriate for "Wissenschaft"? 2. it is a scientific term to describe the West Germanic dialects having undergone the High German sound shift at present time, short for Neuhochdeutsch. This includes the standard language, too, of course.
3. it includes old high German, middle high German, and new high German.
Sepia used the first or second definition, obviously.


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## DataNominatue

The artificial (constructed) language *Lojban* [1][2] uses structure words instead of nouns and verbs, cases and declensions, or a fixed word order. It has no redundancy. I wonder whether its very regularity makes it unsuitable as a 'natural' human language. Anyway, although Lojban belongs to the _Loglan_ family of synthetic languages, perhaps it can be useful as a comparison tool for exploring the roles of the differing redundancies in German and English.

*References*

[1] Article on Lojban: (links only permitted after 30 postings)

[2] Overview of Lojban grammar: (links only permitted after 30 postings)


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## Juuuergen

I don't think that if German word order were more rigid that it would lose its gender markings.

Let us take into account French, which, in my opinion, has a rather strict word order and still uses two genders, masculine and feminine. 

Also, I think German word order is quite strict already. That you can move a noun phrase like so doesn't really mean that the language is flexible as far as syntax. In fact, as some other people have already mentioned, "Den Mensch beisst der Hund" isn't exactly a common sentence, but rather one used to show emphasis, which I think is why most linguists classify German as an SVO language.


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## berndf

Juuuergen said:


> I don't think that if German word order were more rigid that it would lose its gender markings.


This has less to do with gender than with case markings. Case markings produce subject, indirect object and direct object position independence.


Juuuergen said:


> Let us take into account French, which, in my opinion, has a rather strict word order and still uses two genders, masculine and feminine.


Good example. French has retained gender markings but lost case markings except in personal pronouns.


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## Juuuergen

Oh, my mistake! Well as for case markings, it does seem like the languages with the more case markings have more flexible word orders. Take for example Polish and the other Slavic languages. I found this example some time ago that does a great job of showing the flexibility of Polish word order:

To say "Ana has a cat" in Polish, you could say it any of these ways (the first is the most common, however):

[Ana ma kota]
[Ana kota ma]
[Kota Ana ma]
[Kota ma Ana]
[Ma Ana Kota]
[Ma kota Ana]

Note: [ma] is the 3rd person singular present tense conjugation of "to have" and [kota] is "cat" in the accusative case (which is very similar to German's accusative case), [kot] being the nominative version.

If German had the same amount inflection that Polish has, I see no reason why the word order would be strict.


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## berndf

Frank06 said:


> This _seems_ to suggest that the phrases
> 1. *Der* Hund beißt *den* Mensch.
> 2. *Den* Mensch beißt *der* Hund.
> are equally common. And here my problem with _flexible_ and _possible_ starts.
> 
> And though I am not that familiar with (spoken) German, I wonder if both sentences can be regarded as equally common. Isn't sentence 2 a highly marked and hence uncommon sentence?
> 
> *I also wonder, in the second case, in how far stress plays a role in spoken German (as an extra marker).*


Here word order is an emphasis marker. Phonetic stress may indeed reinforce this message.

This also answers your first question: They are not equal because 1. is unmarked and 2. emphasizes the object. I'd say it is highly marked yet not uncommon because it is not uncommon to emphasize the object. Of course, the unmarked form is much more frequent but the second is not so infrequent that you would want to call it "uncommon".


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## Hutschi

berndf said:


> We don't have to speculate. Many German dialects have already lost (almost) all case inflections, including genitive.
> 
> E.g. in Low German you say:
> _Ick geev dat book an min Süster ehr Fründ._
> _(I gave the book to my sister her friend.)_





Frank78 said:


> Hmh? I´ve never heard any dialect in which all nouns and articles are in nominative case. ...



This phrase is rather old. It also exists in High German, especially in dialect regions:
"Ich gab das Buch meiner Schwester ihr'm Freund".

Here not all phrases are nominative, of course.

The most Germans consider it as awkward form now. 
This form is also used in folk songs (Volksliedern) and it is also known in English. 

It was available in Old High German and in Old English, in English it was lost for some centuries but reinstated later and lost again. In German it is available but it becomes more and more obsolete - except that it is used. If it would not be used, nobody would damn it.

It is discussed here: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1359590 and here: http://forum.wordreference.com/showthread.php?t=1530134


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## berndf

Hutschi said:


> Here not all phrases are nominative, of course.


Absolutely. It seems Frank confuses lack of case makers with nominative. The noun phrase "min Süster ehr Fründ" is still accusative even if there is no accusative case marker present.


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## Awwal12

Juuuergen said:


> Oh, my mistake! Well as for case markings, it does seem like the languages with the more case markings have more flexible word orders. Take for example Polish and the other Slavic languages. I found this example some time ago that does a great job of showing the flexibility of Polish word order:
> 
> To say "Ana has a cat" in Polish, you could say it any of these ways (the first is the most common, however):
> 
> [Ana ma kota]
> [Ana kota ma]
> [Kota Ana ma]
> [Kota ma Ana]
> [Ma Ana Kota]
> [Ma kota Ana]
> 
> Note: [ma] is the 3rd person singular present tense conjugation of "to have" and [kota] is "cat" in the accusative case (which is very similar to German's accusative case), [kot] being the nominative version.
> 
> If German had the same amount inflection that Polish has, I see no reason why the word order would be strict.


Sure. ) That is because German, English and many other languages are _analytic_ (their syntax is built on word order and large number of auxiliary words), whereas almost all Slavic languages are _synthetic_ (where function of a word in a sentence is more or less clear from its grammatical form).


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## Angelo di fuoco

Rozax said:


> We're all familiar with this example:
> *Der* Hund beißt *den* Mensch.
> *Den* Mensch beißt *der* Hund.



Although in modern German, especially when it is spoken, the weak declension is hardly used any more, the correct accusative form of "der Mensch" is only "den Menschen": "sch" is a remainder of something that was like der/die/das "Männische" (German linguists please give the right form if the one I've use is not exact) and thus originally an adjective. As you probably know, the adjectives in German all have the (e)n in all cases but nominative.


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## Aydintashar

German is one of the few languages which is both strongly inflected (articles, adjectives, nouns) and you still have some rigidity in the word order. At least the position of the verb is absolutely rigid. This shouldn't have been the case, with this much inflection. In the main sentence the verb takes the second position, while it takes the last position in the subordinate. Turkish is much less inflected, nevertheless the word order is more flexible. Perhaps the sole function of the German rigid rule for the verb is to differentiate the main and the subordinate sentence.

I would also stress that, correlating inflection with word order is not always correct. We cannot say that the flexibility in word order is always achieved through shooting aways the case endings. Word order has a lot to do with the psychology of the native speakers. Natives of certain languages stick to certain word orders, because they are following a certain pattern in the mind which assigns different degrees of significance to different grammatical categories such as subject, verb, object etc. Same is true of the languages which use postpositions instead of prepositions.


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## trbl

Aydintashar said:


> German is one of the few languages which is both strongly inflected (articles, adjectives, nouns) and you still have some rigidity in the word order. At least the position of the verb is absolutely rigid. This shouldn't have been the case, with this much inflection. In the main sentence the verb takes the second position, while it takes the last position in the subordinate. Turkish is much less inflected, nevertheless the word order is more flexible. Perhaps the sole function of the German rigid rule for the verb is to differentiate the main and the subordinate sentence.



German is a moderately inflected language.   

I believe that the reason why German word order has become less flexible is the same as for other western European languages: loss of inflection. 
German might still be the most inflectional among the major Romance and Germanic languages, but it's been following the same basic trend toward a more analytical structure, albeit at a slower pace.   

In Old High German, a noun could take on up to 10 different case endings. 
In modern German, most masculine and neutral nouns have only retained case endings in the genitive singular and dative plural, while most feminine nouns have lost their case endings altogether. As shown above, this can lead to ambiguity and confusion without a relatively fixed word order.


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## Angelo di fuoco

I think the most inflectional language - and the most conservative - amongst the Germanic languages is Icelandic...

By the way, whence came the 10 endings? Did Old High German possess 5 cases or what was the matter?


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