
Ask German HN: Are Cases in the German Language Similar to Typing in a Language? - kpennell
I&#x27;m starting to learn German cases, the dative and accusative in particular. In one video explanation, the woman says &quot;the is always the&quot; in English. While in German, we need to switch the word depending on whether the object is direct or indirect.<p>I started wondering: the in English sounds like weak typing. The &#x27;the&#x27; doesn&#x27;t tell you anything about the object itself, kind of like weak typing in programming doesn&#x27;t tell you the data type of the variable. Using Der vs. Dem, on the other hand, gives the reader&#x2F;speaker a clue that that word is the indirect object. Sounds a lot like strong typing.
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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. :-)

~~~
kpennell
thx for the response.

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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

