7.2 Meine Familie — Epoché
What you will be able to do Read 482 words of continuous German in which almost every sentence contains a possessive, and keep track of who owns what. Tell apart the five jobs done by the one small word ihr , using nothing but the sentence around it. Explain why a possessive in German agrees with two things at once, and why that is easier than it sounds for an English speaker. Read a German narrative that mixes the present tense with the perfect, and say which job each tense is doing. Read a paragraph aloud without losing the sentence bracket in the long sentences. Prerequisites : 7.1 and 2.9 — the reading habit from the first text and the possessives lesson, on which this text is built. The perfect tense from the verbs volume is assumed as well. Since the first reading text you have gained separable verbs, questions, the imperative, the middle field, the two kinds of because , the prepositions of place, and — the reason this text exists — the possessives. What you probably lack is confidence in holding a possessive in your head while reading forwards: the tables in 2.9 gave you twenty-four forms and a warning, which is not yet a skill. Read the companion document first, straight through, once. You may find yourself reading faster than on the first text, although this one is longer and has more grammar. About this text Meine Familie — my family — is a first-person description of nine people, written for this course: eight paragraphs, 482 words. Two things were designed. First, the density of possessives: more than forty in 482 words, far above ordinary prose, but natural in a family description. Second, the word ihr , which does five separate jobs with one spelling. All five appear here, each in a context that decides it, and a section below takes them in order. The tense also changes. The first text was all present. This one is mostly present — a family is described as it is — but drops into the perfect for things that happened: the grandfather worked forty years in a factory, the neighbour asked a question yesterday, the family held a party in August. That is how spoken German handles the past. English would use a simple past for most of those, so the two languages do not map one to one, as 3.5 warned. What a German possessive agrees with An English possessive agrees only with the owner: his book, her book, their book. German agrees with the owner in the stem, then adds an ending that agrees with the thing owned. English speakers reliably do the first and forget the second. Stem (who owns) In this text mein- my mein Vater , meine Mutter , meinen Bruder — three endings on one stem, because the father is masculine and subject, the mother is feminine, and the brother is masculine and object sein- his sein Zimmer , seine Bücher , sein Computer , seine Gitarre — all of them belonging to one fifteen-year-old brother ihr- her, their, or your ihr Deutsch , ihre Tochter , ihr Haus , Ihre Mutter — the section below untangles these unser- our unser Garten , unsere Nachbarn — note that the ending goes on after the -er , which is part of the stem and not an ending euer- your, to several people eure Fotos — and here the stem loses a letter when an ending arrives, which is the one irregularity in the whole set The endings are the endings of ein from 2.3 and 2.5 — nothing new. A possessive is ein with a different front end: if you can say ein Garten and eine Katze , you can say unser Garten and ihre Katze . The twenty-four forms of 2.9 collapse into one rule plus a handful of stems. The trap is that the stem and the ending answer different questions, and under pressure you will answer one of them twice. Ihr Mann is her husband : the stem says she owns him, the bare ending says he is masculine and the subject. The owner's gender is in the stem, not the ending. The five jobs of ihr One spelling covers three possessives and two pronouns, and the capital letter distinguishes only one of them, and only in writing. All five are in this text. In the text What it is doing und ihr Deutsch ist sehr gut her — possessive, one female owner. The mother studied in Warsaw, so the German is hers Ihr Mann heißt Paul, und ihre Tochter ist zwei Jahre alt her again, twice, with two different endings. Capitalised here only because it opens the sentence Ihr Haus ist alt, ihr Garten ist groß, und ihre Katze ist dick their — possessive, two owners, the grandparents. Identical spelling to the row above and a different meaning Wohnt Ihre Mutter auch hier? Und wie heißt Ihr Bruder? your — possessive, polite. The capital is compulsory in the middle of a sentence and it is the only signal Kinder, wo seid ihr? you — a personal pronoun, plural and informal, not a possessive at all. The verb seid proves it wir helfen ihr im Garten to her — a personal pronoun in the dative. The neighbour is being helped, and the case is doing work you meet properly in the second phase Six rows for five jobs, because her gets two. In practice you will almost never be in doubt. In the third row the owners were named in the sentence before; in the fourth the capital letter decides; in the fifth a plural verb ending rules out a possessive; in the sixth there is no noun for a possessive to attach to. Reading forwards, you resolve it without noticing. The fourth row is the possessive of Sie , the polite you, which is grammatically a plural — hence its resemblance to their . English politeness has no separate pronoun, so this feels back to front. The informal plural possessive is a different word, euer , as in eure Fotos in the party paragraph. So your is dein to one friend, euer to several, and Ihr to anyone you would not call by a first name. Frau Berger, the old neighbour, uses the polite form to the narrator and the informal plural to the children in consecutive sentences — the most German thing in the text. Grammatical gender is not sex One sentence in the third paragraph stops English readers: Das Mädchen heißt Mia. Es lacht viel und hat immer Hunger.