Hello and welcome back to German Grammarpod. Today we’re going to be looking at cases, in particular the nominative case.
A case is a way of showing what role a word is playing in a sentence. In English we do this with word order, so in the sentence Peter ate a shark, we know that Peter is doing the eating and the shark is being eaten, because Peter was the first word and the shark was mentioned after the verb. In German, however, you can show which way round the sentence is happening by the case. This shows up in the form of any determiner you use - that’s words like a, the, this, some and my - the ending on any adjectives, the form of any pronoun - that’s words like I, you, me, we or us and in some cases in the form that the noun takes. In our example, the only determiner, adjective or pronoun is the determiner a before shark. So, we have a choice between the sentences
Peter hat einen Hai gegessen
and
Peter hat ein Hai gegessen.
Despite both having the same word order, the first one means Peter ate the shark and the second one means that a shark ate Peter. In fact, to be doubly confusing, I could have it the other way round:
Ein Hai hat Peter gegessen
or
Einen Hai hat Peter gegessen.
That second sentence also means that Peter ate the shark, not the other way round. That’s because in German, markers of case - that is the form that the determiner you’ve used takes or the ending of the adjective - are a more important signaller of a word’s role in the sentence than the order in which it comes. This is particularly difficult for native English speakers, because firstly, you need to know how all the adjectives and determiners change in all the cases, secondly, in some cases you need to know what gender a word is to work out what case is being used and thirdly, it has been argued that if your native language relies on word order to show the roles of words in an utterance, this is what your brain will always automatically look for in all languages, and you will always have to make a conscious effort to check for other markers like case instead.
That all sounds pretty difficult, but in practical terms, it’s not generally that difficult. Most of the time German uses a similar word order to English in sentences, so the person or thing doing the action comes first and the person or thing the action is done to comes second. The main reason that a sentence would get turned round the other way is for emphasis. We can do that in English too, but we’d add in extra words to show what we were doing, so for instance we could use the passive and say
A shark was eaten by Peter
or
we could restructure the sentence and say:
It was a shark that Peter ate.
German doesn’t need to do this to put the shark in first position, it can just use its case system to show who was doing the eating and who was being eaten.
When you first start learning German, the chances are that all the sentences you come across will be in the same order that an English one would be, in terms of person or thing doing the action first, person or thing that the action is done to second. At this point, it is mainly important to know that the cases exist and know what they are for rather than be able to use them correctly, as this explains why determiners and adjectives can have so many different forms and explains why there are two different words for me. It takes quite a bit of knowledge, including the genders of the nouns you are using, to be able to use the cases correctly, so I would advise not worrying too much about trying to use the correct case in your sentences until you have been learning for a while. Later on, it will become more important to be able to use cases correctly, and I am about to give you tips on how to do this. Later still, it becomes important to remind yourself to check whether the cases used match what you were expecting from the word order, or whether they’re a different way round. Personally, I found that this mainly became important after I had left university and became a translation checker.
German has four cases, the nominative, the accusative, the genitive and the dative. All nouns you ever come across in German have to be in one of those cases. Today, I’m only going to look at the nominative. I’ll be covering the other three tenses in the next three podcasts.
The nominative case is the one you find in the dictionary, and the case you will be taught first for any word where case makes a difference - that’s mainly determiners, adjectives and pronouns.
The nominative is the case that you use for the person that’s doing the action. Most sentences, and certainly every simple sentence, like the sort you learn when you’re just starting to learn a language will have a nominative in it. The simplest sentences generally take the form:
NOMINATIVE, VERB, ACCUSATIVE,
for instance:
Ich esse die Wurst
(I eat the sausage)
Er liebt Cora
(He loves Cora)
or
Peter hat zwei Brüder
(Peter has two brothers)
In English, one of the few places you can still see the remnants of a case system is in the pronouns I and me. Although English is not considered to have a nominative case, the word I is generally used in English where a nominative would be used in German, and me is generally used where one of the other cases would be used - the accusative or the dative. So, as a rough rule of thumb, this means that if you could swap the noun or pronoun you want to use for an I in English, you should be using a nominative in German. For instance, with the sentence Peter ate a shark, you could make the sentence I ate a shark, so you know that you should put Peter in the nominative in German. On the other hand, you would not say *Peter ate I, so you wouldn’t put shark in the nominative - I’ll come on to what case shark should be in next time.
But, two words of warning: firstly, just because a sentence doesn’t make sense with a person doing the action, doesn’t mean that one of the words is not in the nominative. So just because I closed at 5 o’clock does not make much sense, does not mean the shop in the shop closed at 5 o’clock is not in the nominative. Secondly, because in German sentences the word order does not necessarily show where the nominative is, you can’t use the method of seeing where an I would sound right in the English word for word translation to find the nominative. Instead you need to look for the German signals as to where the nominative might be in a sentence.
There are also some places where German uses a nominative where English would or could not use an I for various reasons. First off, it’s also used when addressing people, as in the Herr Schmidt of Herr Schmidt, Telefon für Sie, or Tag, Michael!
Secondly, there’s a set of verbs that you use it on both sides of, i.e. NOMINATIVE, VERB, NOMINATIVE. Those verbs are sein, werden, bleiben, heißen and scheinen, that’s to be, to become (and also would and will), to stay, to be called and to seem or appear. Examples of these are:
Ich bin Einzelkind
Thomas bleibt mein bester Freund
Sie wird Lehrerin
Ich heiße Laura
Er scheint furchtbarer Chef
One final place where you will find the nominative in German where you would not find one in English, depending on the English speaker, is in sentences comparing one thing to another. So in English, many speakers (including me) will use sentences like:
He’s bigger than me.
She’s better read than me.
As opposed to:
He’s bigger than I.
She’s better read than I.
which other speakers of the language consider to be the correct usage.
In German, however, this is not an area which is a subject of difference of opinion at the moment, so there is no debate as to correct usage. German always uses a nominative in this position, so you get:
Er ist größer als ich
Sie ist belesener als ich.
So how does the nominative show up in the German language? Well, as I mentioned earlier, you see it in determiners, adjectives and pronouns and nouns. I’ll start with nouns because they’re easy, the nominative is the basic form of the noun, it’s the form you see in dictionaries, so there are no changes to this form when you use a nominative. With pronouns too, it’s pretty simple, it’s the first form you’re likely to have learnt of them, so:
ich,
du,
er, sie, es,
wir,
ihr,
Sie &
sie
meaning
I,
you (informal, singular)
he, she, it,
we
you (informal, plural)
you (formal, singular & plural) &
they, respectively.
It would take a very long time indeed to go through every example of the nominative case for determiners and adjectives, so for now I’m going to stick with the examples I think are most useful, and stick down in my diary that I need to try and revisit this topic at a later date. I’m going to run through all the examples in the order MASCULINE, FEMININE NEUTER, PLURAL. By the way, in case you were wondering, the plural doesn’t change depending on the gender as it does in some languages. I will also provide a table on the website uk.geocities.com/germangrammarpod (there’s a link to it on the blog in case you get to that one first).
So, my first key example is the word a. This comes out in the nominative as
ein (masculine) eine (feminine) and ein (neuter)
There is not plural version of this word for obvious reasons, but if we take its opposite, no, as in No rabbit has ever been known to dance the Congo, as opposed to No, I won’t do that, then you end up with
kein (masculine) keine (feminine), kein (neuter) and keine (plural).
After ein or kein, or when you haven’t used a determiner at all, then adjectives decline with the following endings:
-er for masculine, -e for feminine, -es for neuter and -e for plural.
So you get:
ein alter Mann, eine alte Frau, ein altes Bier and keine alte Männer.
With the word the, it’s a bit different. The masculine, feminine, neuter and plural of the are:
der, die, das and die.
And after a the, all adjectives take an -e as their nominative ending, except after the plural, which takes a -en, distinguishing itself from the feminine form, so you get:
der alte Mann, die alte Frau, das alte Bier and die alten Männer.
That’s it for this time. If you’d like, you can let me know what you think of this podcast, and make any suggestions for making it easier to understand or more enjoyable to listen to by emailing me at germangrammarpod(at)yahoo.co.uk You can also find transcripts of the podcasts and tables relating to the points of grammar we’ve been going through on the website uk.geocities.com/germangrammarpod. If you’re having difficulty finding it, try putting German Grammarpod into Google (Grammarpod’s all one word), and my blog and my website should both come up on the first page. Next time we’ll be looking at the accusative case, so until then, goodbye for now.