“No One Who Speaks German Could Be an Evil Man”
[The following was written last August. I haven't gotten around to publishing it until now.]
Have you ever been unsure whether to use “I” or “me”? These pronouns, in particular, are frequent targets of hypercorrection. As children, we were scolded when we asked, “Mommy, can Billy and me go to the park?” “May Billy and I go to the park”, came the correction. Consequently, you may often hear people say, “And then the police came and arrested Billy and I”. By then, however, our mothers are not there to tell us that we should have said “Billy and me”.
People get confused about whether to use “I” or “me” because they often cannot distinguish between a subject and an object. In my first example above, “Billy and I” are the subjects; in my second example, “the police” is the subject, and “Billy and me” are the objects. I know this isn’t the National Grammar Rodeo, but I bring it up because my concept of language has completely changed in the last two years. Some of the change is attributable to my getting a degree in English. For the most part, however, the change came about because I wanted to learn German.
German does something that English, by and large, does not: it declines. Declension is a feature of some languages that alters nouns, pronouns, and adjectives to indicate gender, possession, number, and case (that is, direct- or indirect object). As I showed above, “I” and “me” are merely different versions of the same concept, like “she” and “her”, “he” and “him”, and their possessive equivalents, “hers” and “his”. Those pronouns are also among the few English words that demonstrate gender. English also declines by adding an “s” or “es” to the end of most nouns to change their number. But that is relatively simple, and, for the most part, marks the end of English declension. German, on the other hand, declines in every way imaginable, and it is a nightmare.
In English, we take for granted that the articles “a” (or “an”) and “the” are all we need to know. Germans have these articles, too, of course, but, like many languages that distinguish gender, they are different for masculine, feminine, and neuter nouns: der Baum (the tree) is masculine; die Lilie (the lily) is feminine; and, oddly, das Mädchen (the girl) is neuter. In German, the gender of a word seems to have little relation to its concept, and aside from the article, no indication of gender is given, unlike Spanish, for instance, where a word ending in “o” is likely masculine, and so on. With German, you must learn the article with the word. But, those articles you see above only count when the word is used in the nominative case. If, for example, “der Baum” is not used as the subject of a sentence, but as the direct object, it becomes “den Baum”. If the tree is the indirect object, it becomes “dem Baum”. And the feminine “die Lilie”, when used as an indirect object, becomes “der Lilie”. In order to know, then, that the lily is a feminine noun and not masculine, you have to understand how the sentence functions. “Das Mädchen”, which we know is neuter, uses the same article as a masculine noun in the dative case, and becomes “dem Mädchen”.
Should you wish to indicate that you possess something–let’s say a tree–in English, you need only say “my”, no matter how the sentence is structured: “My tree is tall” (subject); “I climbed my tree” (direct object); “I gave some water to my tree” (indirect object). Even when indicating that the tree possesses something, we still use “my”: “I climbed up to my tree’s highest bough”. In German, those examples become, in order, “mein Baum”, “meinen Baum”, “meinem Baum”, and “meines Baum”. All four of those mean “my tree” in English.
In English, “you” is always “you”, whether used as the subject, direct- or indirect object. In German, “du” is the subject version of “you”: “You are my friend”. “Dich” is the direct object version of “you”: “I love you” = “Ich liebe dich”. “Dir” is the dative version of “you” used as an indirect object.
Don’t get me started on the adjective endings.
So, next time you meet a fluent German speaker, congratulate him. He understands the functions of language way better than you.
Leave a Reply