# Zum Glück und unser aller Vergnügen



## elroy

Zum Glück und *unser aller Vergnügen* kann US-Amerikanischer Humor sehr viel mehr als nur infantile Wortspielchen.  

How does this break down grammatically?

I think the following are okay: 

1.) Zum Glück und *unserem* Vergnügen 
2.) Zum Glück und *dem* Vergnügen *von uns allen *

Is there no dative determiner in the original because there’s a preposed genitive?  If so, does that mean the following also works?

3.) Zum Glück und *dem* Vergnügen *unser aller*

Any thoughts on 1.) and 2.)? 

Thanks!


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## bearded

Hello elroy
I find that the original sentence, as well as your 1,2,3), are idiomatically acceptable, but not 100% correct according to the grammar.
'Zum' (=zu dem) should only refer to the first element, therefore a repetition of 'zu' would be necessary in my view:
- zum Glück und zu unser aller Vergnügen
- zum Glück und zu unserem Vergnügen
- zum Glück und zum Vergnügen von uns allen/unser aller.
You can call the original and no.1,2,3 (the way you wrote them) ''elliptic phrases'' if you want, since the 2nd 'zu' is missing. But I know they are very common.


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## manfy

bearded said:


> 'Zum' (=zu dem) should only refer to the first element, therefore a repetition of 'zu' would be necessary in my view:
> - zum Glück und zu unser aller Vergnügen
> - zum Glück und zu unserem Vergnügen
> - zum Glück und zum Vergnügen von uns allen/unser aller.


 "Normally", yes!
But in this specific phrase, the deliberate elision of 'zu' makes it a witty and nice-sounding phrase!

I see no actual semantic difference between 1,2,3. The first version sounds best, I think.


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## bearded

manfy said:


> I see no actual semantic difference between 1,2,3


Well, actually in 1) the concept 'alle' is missing….
I'm glad that you agree with me, as concerns 'normality'(grammar), and, as I wrote, all are idiomatic even if elliptic. I wouldn't be so sure that the elision of 'zu' is deliberate, though: I rather think that many people would talk/write that (witty) way in any case!


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## elroy

Let’s go ahead and put in the missing/elided “zu”:

Zum Glück und zu* unser aller Vergnügen* kann US-Amerikanischer Humor sehr viel mehr als nur infantile Wortspielchen.  

1.) Zum Glück und zu *unserem* Vergnügen 
2.) Zum Glück und zum Vergnügen *von uns allen *
3.) Zum Glück und zum Vergnügen *unser aller*

My question is about the grammar of “unser aller.”  If this is genitive, how come “unser” is not inflected?


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## bearded

Of course it's genitive!
canoonet <<------


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## Ief

"unser" is inflected, indeed, it's a possessive pronoun to mark a genitivus possessivus. In dativ it is a personalpronoun because we don't have a dativus possesisvus in german. Therefore "_Zum Glück und zum Vergnügen _*von uns allen" *sounds primitive. It's just an auxiliary structure with _"von" _to mark the possessive aspect of "_aller"_. But it's some kind of hillbilly german.

In Germany there's also a well known book about this phenomena. It's called _Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod_.

By the way

"_Zum Glück_" and _"zu unser aller Vergnügen"_ doesn't belong together here semantically.


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## bearded

Ief said:


> we don't have a dativus possesisvus in german. Therefore "_Zum Glück und zum Vergnügen _*von uns allen" *sounds primitive


Sorry, I don't understand your 'therefore'.  Suppose in German there were a _dativus possessivus_: how would it fit into the above phrase?
In Latin there is such a dative of possession: mihi est panis ('mir ist Brot')= I have bread.  But here? Please clarify.


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## Ief

bearded said:


> Sorry, I don't understand your 'therefore'



Daher?



bearded said:


> In Latin there is such a dative of possession: mihi est panis ('mir ist Brot')= I have bread. But here? Please clarify.



I know. But as said above, there is no such construction in german.


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## Perseas

In einem älteren Thread war für einen ähnlichen Fall (_zu unser aller Überraschung_) eine mögliche Erklärung geschrieben worden, die hier nicht zutreffend scheint.
zu unser aller Überraschung

Und hier ist der Link zu cannoonet, der bei Demiurgs Beitrag nicht funktioniert.
Fragen Sie Dr. Bopp! » unser beider Hund


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## bearded

Ief said:


> Daher?


I know what 'therefore' means (for abt. 60 years already), but shouldn't it introduce a consequence of what was previously said?  In your reasoning there was no such consequence, if referred to the phrases we are talking about: that's what I don't/didn't understand.  A dative of possession just wouldn't fit here, methinks, even if it existed in German.


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## Ief

But...I *did *draw a consequence?

We have no dative of possession and here one is used rather badly as an auxiliary construction. Therefore it's bad german.


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## Ief

Perseas said:


> In einem älteren Thread war für einen ähnlichen Fall (_zu unser aller Überraschung_) eine mögliche Erklärung geschrieben worden, die hier nicht zutreffend scheint.
> zu unser aller Überraschung



Doch, doch, das trifft eigentlich den Kern der Sache. Es ist also die bekannte Haplologie, der wir hier aufsaßen.


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## bearded

Wir reden aneinander vorbei.  Suppose in German there is ''mir ist Vergnügen'' dative of possession instead of ''Ich habe Vergnügen''. How could this enter into the OP sentence _Zum Glück und unser aller Vergnügen kann...''?  ''Zum Vergnügen von uns allen''_ is a periphrastic construct instead of _zum Vergnügen unser aller: _therefore (daher) in the sentence it stands for a genitive, not for any dative. I don't understand why you mentioned a possessive dative in the first place.


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## Frieder

bearded said:


> zum Vergnügen unser aller


... kenne ich so nicht und ich halte es für falsch. Ich würde stets sagen: „Zu unser aller Vergnügen.”


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## bearded

You are right, Frieder, it's just an unidiomatic grammar example (taken from elroy's sentence no. 3)).


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## JClaudeK

Ief said:


> "unser" is inflected, indeed, it's a possessive pronoun to mark a genitivus possessivus.


Niet!
Das gebeugte Possessivpronomen im Genitiv würde hier lauten "unseres".

Vergleiche 


> Es handelt sich um die Kombination eines Personalpronomens mit _alle_ resp. _beide_. Solche Wortgruppen werden in folgender Weise gebeugt:
> 
> 
> 
> Nom: wir alle, wir beide
> Akk: uns alle, uns beide
> Dat: uns allen, uns beiden
> Gen: unser aller, unser beider
Click to expand...


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## manfy

Frieder said:


> ... kenne ich so nicht und ich halte es für falsch. Ich würde stets sagen: „Zu unser aller Vergnügen.”


Du bist wahrscheinlich nur zu jung dafür , aber nöö, wirklich falsch ist es nicht. Es ist nachgestellter Genitiv.
des Hauses Mann -> der Mann des Hauses
unser aller Vergnügen -> das Vergnügen unser aller 

Aber zugegeben, es hat einen leicht biblischen Einschlag, so wie "Vater unser, der du bist..."
Und in der Tat scheint dieser Nachstellung speziell in religiösen Texten recht beliebt: "Der Herr, Gott und Vater unser aller, ..."


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## Ief

JClaudeK said:


> Das gebeugte Possessivpronomen im Genitiv würde hier lauten "unseres".


Du meintest wohl нет, Genosse. Schau mal in den von Perseas zitierten Fred. Vielleicht lohnt sich das Rumrussischen dann gar nicht.


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## Thersites

Zu unserem allem Vergnügen?


Ief said:


> Du meintest wohl нет, Genosse. Schau mal in den von Perseas zitierten Fred. Vielleicht lohnt sich das Rumrussischen dann gar nicht.


Wie ging das eigentlich in der DDR, hatte man da eine eigene Rechtschreibregelung?


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## Ief

Nein, Komsomol-Treffen!

Ich muss mal interessehalber in meinem Duden von 1971 schauen. Aber das ist sicher wieder Off-Topic,...


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## Ief

bearded said:


> Wir reden aneinander vorbei.  Suppose in German there is ''mir ist Vergnügen'' dative of possession instead of ''Ich habe Vergnügen''. How could this enter into the OP sentence _Zum Glück und unser aller Vergnügen kann...''?  ''Zum Vergnügen von uns allen''_ is a periphrastic construct instead of _zum Vergnügen unser aller: _therefore (daher) in the sentence it stands for a genitive, not for any dative. I don't understand why you mentioned a possessive dative in the first place.


 I see your point. Elroy asked why "_unser_" isn't inflected confirming to the dative case of "_Zum Glück_". Therefore I tried to explain, that these are different constructions and the genitive "_unser_" can't be dative if you want to express a possession. So...?


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## Kajjo

elroy said:


> Zum Glück und unser aller Vergnügen


In a stricter sense, this is grammatically wrong. The "zu" cannot be elided, because it is declined differently (zu vs zum).


bearded said:


> zum Glück und zu unser aller Vergnügen


This is the correct form.


manfy said:


> the deliberate elision of 'zu' makes it a witty and nice-sounding phrase!


This is true nonetheless, because the intentionally wrong ellipsis or zeugma draws attention. If we are sure the speaker is aware of his "mistake" this is usually received as witty. If we believe it to be a mistake, it sounds wrong and stupid.

More drastic forms of zeugma using a verb in different meanings:

_"Ich heiße nicht nur Heinz Erhardt, sondern Sie auch herzlich willkommen."
"Er trat die Tür ein und den Rückweg an."_


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## elroy

In my last post, I tried to re-focus the discussion on what I'm actually asking about, which has nothing to do with the missing/elided "zu," which has unfortunately detracted significantly from the topic.  Let's delete "zum Glück" completely and consider only the sentence below (please!):

*Zu unser aller Vergnügen* kann US-Amerikanischer Humor sehr viel mehr als nur infantile Wortspielchen.

My question is about "unser aller," and how that breaks down grammatically.

Obviously "unser aller" is a genitive attribute, since the  meaning is "of us all."  Typically, this genitive attribute would come _after_ the modified noun, not before.  When it _does_ come before, no determiner is necessary before the noun.  Compare:

der Niedergang des Mächtigen  (determiner + post-positioned genitive attribute)
des Mächtigen Niedergang (pre-posed genitive attribute + no determiner)

It's as though the genitive attribute, if pre-posed, "swallows" any existing determiner.  Crucially, though, in this example, the genitive attribute looks *exactly the same* whether it's post-positioned or pre-posed. 

This also applies to "alle," I assume:

zum Vergnügen aller
zu aller Vergnügen

(Please correct me if I'm wrong about "alle.")

Where it gets tricky is "unser."  If we place this before the noun, we get:

zu unser*em* Vergnügen

where "unserem" is itself the determiner -- at least in traditional analyses.  Now I'm starting to wonder whether the actual determiner is just "-em", a relic of "dem", and "unser" is a genitive attribute?

This time, if we place the genitive attribute _after_ the noun, we _don't/can't _preserve the form, because

zum Vergnügen unserem*

is clearly ungrammatical.

What we would normally say is "zum Vergnügen *von uns*," using a dative substitute for the genitive.  But what if we didn't want to do that?  What if we wanted to use an actual genitive -- as old-fashioned, literary, or stilted as that may sound?  What form do we use, and why?

In the original sentence, it seems that the use of "aller" affected the inflection of the "of us" part.  If "aller" weren't there, it would be "unserem," but with "aller" there, all of a sudden it's "unser," not "unserem."  This makes sense to me to some extent, in light of what I said above about determiners dropping when genitives are preposed: we could plausibly analyze "unser aller" as a unit that is a genitive attribute behaving just like "des Mächtigen" above, even though "unser" on its own can't behave this way because it has to be "unserem" if pre-posed.

Which would suggest that "unser" is perhaps the genitive of "uns," and not just a determiner stem, as it is traditionally taught as.  In fact, as I intimated above, perhaps "unserem" is (diachronically) a contraction of the genitive "unser" and the dative determiner "dem" -- and not a determiner stem ("unser-") with a dative inflection ("-em").

If this is right, then it nicely explains the facts:

"uns-" (here) is a stem meaning "us."  To make "of us," we add "-er" (genitive).  If this is post-positioned, the noun gets a determiner if necessary: "zum Vergnügen unser."  If it's pre-posed, we (exceptionally) do keep the dative determiner, but we add it to the genitive "unser": "zu unserem Vergnügen", not "zum unser Vergnügen*".

If we bring "aller" into the picture, then "unser aller" is a unit that behaves like any other genitive attribute: no surface-level determiner in any form if pre-posed.

If I'm not right, then what is actually going on?


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## manfy

So many questions and so little time.


elroy said:


> Where it gets tricky is "unser."  If we place this before the noun, we get:
> 
> zu unser*em* Vergnügen
> 
> where "unserem" is itself the determiner -- at least in traditional analyses.  Now I'm starting to wonder whether the actual determiner is just "-em", a relic of "dem", and "unser" is a genitive attribute?


And that's where you're wrong.
zu unserem Vergnügen = zu dem unseren Vergnügen

In this form 'unserem' is a "Possessivpronomen", a possessive article to be more exact, in dative case and NOT a genitive attribute.
You can recognize tat easily by converting it to genitive: Unser*es* Vergnügen*s* wegen haben wir...

If you want to postposition it, things change:
zum Vergnügen unser = zu dem Vergnügen unser

Now, 'unser' is a personal pronoun in genitive case (and also a genitive attribute, I think)

When you add 'aller' to 'unser' it is always a personal pronoun and 'aller' is an extension to 'unser' and not vice-versa.
cf. ihr vs ihr alle -> semantically, 'alle' quantifies 'ihr'

Because it is genitive now, we say "zu *unser aller* Vergnügen" and not dative "*zu uns allen Vergnügen".
(Test with easily recognizable dative: Er kommt zu uns allen. -> zu we*m*? -> zu uns allen.)

Alles klar?


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## berndf

elroy said:


> Typically, this genitive attribute would come _after_ the modified noun, not before.


Not necessarily. This is a very recent (max 150 years old) convention. In idiomatic phrases everything is possible. Especially phrases associated with higher registers, like this one, ofter reverse the order to make the phrase sound more literary.


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