2.9 Demonstratives and possessives — Epoché
What you will be able to do Use the demonstrative in the nominative and the accusative — dieser Hund , diese Geschichte , dieses Auto , diesen Mann — and see that its endings are the endings of the definite article with a stem in front of them. Use the question word welch- , as in Aus welcher Richtung? , and say why German needs no separate word for those . Put the right ending on mein , dein , sein , ihr , unser and euer , and explain why the last of them is the one shape in the set that is not a bare stem. Decide from the context which of the three meanings ihr carries in Ihr Haus ist groß. — her, their, or your addressed to someone you are being polite to. Prerequisites : 2.8 — the separable verb comes just before this lesson, though none of the sentences here needs it. You also need the three genders and the article forms from lesson 2.3, and the nominative and accusative from lesson 2.5, because every word in this lesson takes its endings from those. This lesson has almost nothing new in it. That is the point worth making before anything else: dieser , jener , welcher , mein , dein , sein , ihr , unser and euer are not a fresh paradigm to be learned from scratch. They are stems with endings you already know glued on: the first three follow the definite article, the possessives follow ein . The reason the lesson is here at all, rather than being folded into lesson 2.3, is ihr . German uses that one short word for her , for their , and, capitalised as Ihr , for your when you are addressing someone formally. The three meanings are distinguished by nothing inside the word. An English speaker reading German meets this in the first week and quietly guesses wrong for months, so it gets a section of its own. How English does it English has four demonstratives and they are the last remnant of an inflected system: this , these , that , those . Two of them are singular and two are plural, and that is the only distinction they make. They do not change for gender, because English nouns have no gender, and they do not change for their role in the sentence: this dog bites and I saw this dog use the same form. German makes gender and case distinctions that English dropped, so its single demonstrative stem appears in four shapes in the nominative and the accusative alone, and adds one more, diesem , once you count the cases you meet in the second phase. But the shapes are not new: they are exactly what you would get by taking the definite article and putting the stem in front of it. Where the article for a masculine subject ends in one letter, the demonstrative ends in the same letter. The English distinction between this and that is the one that does not survive the crossing. German has a word that corresponds to that and it is bookish; in speech Germans use either the demonstrative for this or a stressed definite article ( der da , das da ) for both, and mark the difference, if they need to, with a following adverb meaning here or there. So a German sentence with the demonstrative in it may well be best translated with that even though the word is the one you learned as this . Several of the corpus translations below do exactly that, and they are not mistakes. With the possessives the asymmetry runs the other way. English possessives are invariable — my is my in front of anything — but English has four distinct third-person forms where German has fewer — his , her , its , their — and one your for every addressee. German has one word covering her and their and formal your , and a separate word for informal plural your . So English marks the possessor sharply and the noun not at all; German marks the noun sharply and the possessor loosely. The information is the same; it is stored in different places. One more contrast worth naming now, because it saves a whole class of mistakes later. English chooses his or her by the sex of the owner. German chooses the ending of its possessive by the gender of the thing owned, and the stem by the owner. The word for a woman's book takes the stem for her and the ending for a neuter noun, because the noun for book is neuter — the ending tells you nothing about her at all. English speakers regularly try to make the ending agree with the owner, and it never does. One stem, and the endings you already know Here is the demonstrative in the two cases you have met. Read it as a stem plus the article ending rather than as four words to be memorised. Gender or number Nominative Accusative masculine dieser diesen feminine diese diese neuter dieses dieses plural diese diese Compare that with the article table from lesson 2.3 and you will find the same final letters in the same boxes. Only the masculine accusative moves, and it moves in the article too. This is worth doing with a pen once, because the same set of endings will come back for every other determiner in the language, and the effort you spend now is spent for all of them. The same endings go on two more stems. One of them asks a question, and one of them is the bookish word for that. Stem What it means · masculine nominative dies- this, and in practice also that — dieser jen- that, the more distant one; formal and rare in speech — jener welch- which, as a question word — welcher Two practical notes. The middle stem is worth recognising in writing and not worth producing: if you want to say that rather than this, Germans add the word for there instead. The third stem is one you will use constantly, and it is the same word whether the question is about a masculine, feminine or neuter noun — it is the ending, not the word, that tells you which. The possessives are the same trick with six stems There are six stems — seven if you count the capitalised Ihr- of formal address separately — and they take the endings of ein , not of dieser , so they have no ending where ein has none ( dieser Hund but mein Hund , dieses Buch but mein Buch ). Five of them are bare consonant-and-vowel shapes that add the ending without fuss. St