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German articles and pronouns in the genitive and dative cases directly indicate the actions of owning and giving without needing additional words (indeed, this is their function), which can make German sentences appear confusing to English-speaking learners.
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German declension is the paradigm that German uses to define all the ways articles, adjectives and sometimes nouns can change their form to reflect their role in the sentence: subject, object, etc. Declension allows speakers to mark a difference between subjects, direct objects, indirect objects and possessives by changing the form of the word—and/or its associated article—instead of ...
The English indefinite article an is derived from the same root as one. The -n came to be dropped before consonants, giving rise to the shortened form a. The existence of both forms has led to many cases of juncture loss, for example transforming the original a napron into the modern an apron. The Persian indefinite article is yek, meaning one.
Abbreviations: German written abbreviations are often punctuated and are pronounced as the full word when read aloud, such as beispielsweise for bspw. ("for example"). Unlike English, which is moving away from periods in abbreviations in some style guides, the placement of capital letters and periods is important in German. [1]
The letter q in German only ever appears in the sequence qu (/kv/), with the exception of loanwords, e.g., Coq au vin or Qigong (which is also written Chigong). The letter x (Ix, /ɪks/) occurs almost exclusively in loanwords. Native German words that are now pronounced with a /ks/ sound are usually written using chs or cks, as with Fuchs (fox).
Here are some examples: Strong inflection, since no article: Guter Mann, gutes Kind, gute Frau und gute Menschen. Good man, good child, good woman and good people. Mixed inflected, since following indefinite article: Er ist ein guter Mann, es ist ein gutes Kind, sie ist eine gute Frau und sie sind keine guten Menschen.
German sentence structure is the structure to which the German language adheres. The basic sentence in German follows SVO word order. [1] Additionally, German, like all west Germanic languages except English, [note 1] uses V2 word order, though only in independent clauses. In dependent clauses, the finite verb is placed last.