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Ask German HN: Are Cases in the German Language Similar to Typing in a Language?

6 points by kpennell ↗ HN
I'm starting to learn German cases, the dative and accusative in particular. In one video explanation, the woman says "the is always the" in English. While in German, we need to switch the word depending on whether the object is direct or indirect.

I started wondering: the in English sounds like weak typing. The 'the' doesn't tell you anything about the object itself, kind of like weak typing in programming doesn't tell you the data type of the variable. Using Der vs. Dem, on the other hand, gives the reader/speaker a clue that that word is the indirect object. Sounds a lot like strong typing.

5 comments

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iforgotpassword
Well that is an odd analogy. ;-) But I know this strange desire of drawing parallels between natural languages and programming languages (or IT/CS) while learning. I wouldn't call it strong typing though since that would mean we only have 12 classes/types (4 cases 3 genders), not even considering some of these combinations map to the same article.

I think a better analogy would be error correction. It adds some redundancy to the information so it's easier to recover the message when transferred over a noisy channel, since at least for simple sentences you could even omit all articles in either language and still understand. For German that leads to trouble as soon as you make use of its rather flexible grammar (i.e. SVO vs OVS).

Speaking of weird CS analogies: you could say that tonal languages like Chinese use QAM for higher information density while we only use FM. :-)

AlDante2
One point of view that might help is considering cases as being an alternative to prepositions. English has three cases - nominative, indicating the subject of a sentence; accusative, indicating the direct object; and genitive, indicating possession. Rather than using the genitive, we can also use a preposition: David's book, or the book of David.

German has a fourth case for the indirect object. Where English has to use a preposition (e.g. I gave the book to him), German uses the dative case (Ich gab ihm das Buch).

Finnish takes the concept much further - it has fifteen cases, which can be used where English would use a preposition. For example, the abessive case is used where English would use "without", the comitative for "together" or "with".

So cases are not types, they are relations, indicating the role of the noun in the sentence.

yesenadam
How about 'I gave him the book'? (no preposition)
ozzmotik
there is an implied preposition in that sentence, in the sense that that sentence is equivalent to "i gave the book to him". the direct object comes first (the book) which would be the equivalent to the accusative case in German, and the indirect object comes second (him) which would be the dative case in German

thus: ich gab ihm das Buch, or ich habe ihm das Buch gegeben, the former being the Imperfekt form and the latter the Perfekt.

edit: oh i didn't notice that the parent post actually went into that second bit already. sorry, i don't pay attention