A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/ Page 17 of 151 12/8/2017 Genitive Noun Chains In formal or scientific German you will sometimes encounter chains of genitive-case noun phrases which are straightforward to read, but can be awkward to translate into smooth English. For example: die Bücher der Professorinnen der Universität (the books of the women professors of the university) Use sentence diagramming to help you keep the relationships straight when working with long genitive noun chains: main noun: die Bücher modified by: der Professorinnen modified by: der Universität Dative Dative case is used for the indirect object of sentences and with certain prepositions (prepositions are covered in Unit 5). First review the concept of “indirect object” in English. An example is: “The woman (subject) gives the man (indirect object) the book (direct object).” Here we can see that English relies on the order of those two nouns to signal which noun is the direct vs. indirect object. Or consider: “The woman gives the book to the man,” in which English relies on the preposition “to” to signal that the man is getting the book, not the book getting the man! In German, word order is much more flexible. You need to be able to distinguish which phrases are in dative case and which are in accusative case, because this – rather than word order or prepositions as in English – is often what communicates the meaning of the sentence to the reader. Case distinctions can in fact communicate a variety of meanings, as you will learn throughout this course. MASCULINE FEMININE NEUTER DEFINITE dem Mann der Frau dem Mädchen INDEFINITE einem Mann einer Frau einem Mädchen PLURAL DEFINITE INDEFINITE den Männern keinen Männern
Offline Textbook | A Foundation Course in Reading German https://courses.dcs.wisc.edu/wp/readinggerman/print-entire-textbook/ Page 18 of 151 12/8/2017 Some sample sentences: Masculine Feminine Neuter Plural Die Frau gibt dem Mann das Buch. The woman gives the book to the man. (or:) The woman gives the man the book. Der Mann gibt der Frau das Buch. Die Frau gibt dem Mädchen das Buch. Die Frauen geben den Männern die Bücher. Don’t forget the word-order rules from Unit 1. The first example sentence above may also appear in the following forms, but will still have the exact same meaning, although a subtle emphasis is slightly different in each sentence. Dem Mann gibt die Frau das Buch. Das Buch gibt die Frau dem Mann. Think of this as German taking advantage of the expressive freedom granted by the use of cases and endings, a freedom we don’t have in English. Points to remember: 1. dem and einem (i.e., the -m ending) are unique to dative singular, and are thus useful anchors when reading a sentence. 2. Dative plural always adds an –n to the plural form of the noun if one does not already exist, e.g., den Männern (dative n) but den Frauen 3. Many singular nouns appear sometimes with an optional -e ending in the dative case only. Examples: dem Staate, nach Hause, im Grunde 4. When grammar and real-world sense are insufficient to clarify which parts of a sentence are nominative or accusative, you can assume that the subject of the sentence will be the one positioned closer to the verb than the object or indirect object. See for example the first example of the pair above, “Dem Mann gibt ….” Memorization Now is a good time to begin memorizing the article forms for all four cases, three genders, and plural. You will find that it’s much, much simpler to memorize the meanings of the handful of different articles than to learn to recognize the multiple unique forms (plural, genitive, etc.) of every noun in the German language. By Unit 4 you will have finished learning about all the types of word endings associated with
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A Foundation Course in Reading German, 2017a

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