German pronouns
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Standard English personal pronouns: Dialect & Slang: Constituents of a clause &c.: Determinacy: Gender issues: Other languages: |
Standard English personal pronouns:
Dialect & Slang:
Constituents of a clause &c.:
Determinacy:
Gender issues:
Other languages:
German pronouns describe a set of German words with specific functions. As with other pronouns, they are frequently employed as the subject or object of a clause, acting as substitutes for nouns or noun phrases, but are also used in relative clauses to relate the main clause to a subordinate one.
Germanic pronouns are divided into several groups;
The German pronouns must always have the same gender, same number, and same case as their antecedents.
In German, a pronoun may have a certain position in the sentence under special circumstances. First and second person pronouns usually do not, and they can be used anywhere in the sentence—except in certain poetical or informal contexts.
There are also genitive direct objects. But the genitive object, other than accusative or dative objects, is somewhat outdated:
In Modern German, "erinnern" rather takes the prepositional phrase with the preposition an. However, some verbs cannot be constructed otherwise, and thus genitive objects remain common language to some degree. This is true for "entsinnen" (which is archaic in itself), but also for sentences such as:
The two noun and pronoun emphasizers "selber" and "selbst" have slightly different meanings than if used with nominal phrases. They normally emphasize the pronoun, but if they are applied to a reflexive pronoun (in the objective case), they emphasize its reflexive meaning.
The verbs following the formal form of "you"—"Sie"—are conjugated identically as in the third-person plurals. For example, "Sie sprechen Deutsch." This means either "You speak German" or "They speak German", and it is completely up to the context to determine which one it is. "Sie spricht Deutsch." is third person female, this is shown by the change of "en" to "t" in the action (i.e., "sprechen" vs. "spricht"), not context.
This is an example of gender-based pronoun usage that may not be intuitive to an English speaker, because in English the pronoun "it" is always used for an object. In German, objects always have a relevant gender to consider. In the above examples, both birthday and dog are masculine, so "it" becomes "er" in the nominative case and "ihn" in accusative.
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