German pronouns
German pronouns are German words that function as pronouns. As with pronouns in other languages, 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.
Classification and usage
Germanic pronouns are divided into several groups;- Personal pronouns, which apply to an entity, such as the speaker or third parties;
- Possessive pronouns, which describe ownership of objects, institutions, etc.;
- Demonstrative pronouns;
- *Determinative pronouns;
- Reflexive pronouns, in which the subject is also one of the objects;
- Relative pronouns, which connect clauses;
- Interrogative pronouns, which are used in questions, such as who?;
- Indefinite pronouns, which denote entities of quantities.
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 But the genitive object, other than accusative or dative objects, is somewhat outdated: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", 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, they emphasize its reflexive meaning.
Personal pronouns
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, not context.The first of these is an example of gender-based pronoun usage that may not be intuitive to an English speaker, because in English an inanimate object is almost always referenced by the pronoun "it." In German, nouns 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.
Genitive personal pronouns are sometimes explained as indicating possession; however, this is incorrect and redundant, as the definition of a possessive pronoun is already to indicate possession. For example, my book translates to "mein Buch", or "das Buch von mir", and never "das Buch meiner".
The genitive personal pronouns in the table above find very seldom use in modern German and are nearly always made obsolete by modern formulations. There is a well-known German saying "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod", referring to the frequent colloquial replacement of traditionally genitive formulations with dative formulations. Genitive personal pronouns may be used for the genitive object. Archaically, the pronoun form without -er can be used, e.g. Vergissmeinnicht. Another use is after prepositions requiring the genitive case, e.g. "seitens meiner".
Possessive pronouns
Possessive pronouns are formed by adding endings to the genitive case of the personal pronoun, eventually stripping it of its genitive ending. The endings are identical to those of the indefinite article ein.Note: When unser and euer have a suffix, the -er gets reduced to -r; e.g. unsrem, eurem.
Pronouns derived from articles
To replace a nominal by a pronoun that is derived from an article, the declined form corresponding to the gender, case, and number of the nominal phrase is used.Although the pronoun form and the article form are the same in most cases, there are sometimes differences.
The German definite article:
| Masculine | Neuter | Feminine | Plural | |
| Nominativ | der | das | die | die |
| Akkusativ | den | das | die | die |
| Dativ | dem | dem | der | den |
| Genitiv | des | des | der | der |
Reflexive pronouns
There are also reflexive pronouns for the dative case and the accusative case. In the first and second person, they are the same as the normal pronouns, but they only become visible in the third person singular and plural. The third person reflexive pronoun for both plural and singular is: "sich":Reflexive pronouns can be used not only for personal pronouns:
Relative clause
A pronoun contains, or rather, has a relative clause, if there is ever a further meaning to express behind the pronoun, that is to say, some more clarification necessary. The relative pronouns are as follows:| Masculine | Neuter | Feminine | Plural | |
| Nominativ | der | das | die | die |
| Akkusativ | den | das | die | die |
| Dativ | dem | dem | der | denen |
| Genitiv | dessen | dessen | deren | deren |
Instead, welcher may be used, which is seen to be more formal, and only common in interdependent multi-relative clauses, or as a mnemonic to German pupils to learn to distinguish das from dass. The relative pronoun is never omitted in German. On the other hand, in English, the phrase
The young woman I invited for coffee yesterday is my cousin's fiancée.
completely omits the use of a relative pronoun. To state such a thing in German, one would say
Die junge Frau, die ich gestern zum Kaffee eingeladen habe, ist die Verlobte meines Cousins.
Note that the conjugated verb is placed at the end of German relative clauses. This was the preferable use in Latin sentences as well as in Old High German even for main clauses, and remains intact for subclauses, whereas in main clauses the verb takes the second place.
Likewise, an English participle such as
The man coming round the corner is a thief.
is best translated to a relative clause, e.g.
Der Mann, der gerade um die Ecke kommt, ist ein Dieb.
However, it might be translated literally which would result in what some call a very German sentence, e.g.
Der gerade um die Ecke kommende Mann ist ein Dieb.
.
Demonstrative pronouns
pronouns are used to refer to something already defined.jener, -e, -es
dieser, -e, -es
ersterer, -e, -es
letzterer, -e, -es
derjenige, diejenige, dasjenige
derselbe, dieselbe, dasselbe
They follow the format
| Masculine | Neuter | Feminine | Plural | |
| Nominativ | dieser | dieses | diese | diese |
| Akkusativ | diesen | dieses | diese | diese |
| Dativ | diesem | diesem | dieser | diesen |
| Genitiv | dieses | dieses | dieser | dieser |