Josquin wrote:Uneducated Germans sometimes use the dative and a possessive adjective to create a genitive effect: Bist du dem Mann seine Frau? Are you the man's wife?
This is totally correct, but I wouldn't say these constructions are "replacing" the genitive. This is just colloquial language. In standard language, you will have to use the genitive a lot and even in colloquial language you can't totally ignore it.
Systematiker is right when he states that the "dem... sein" construction is correct in several dialects (I disagree about them being different languages though). It's considered substandard however and does sound uneducated to persons who natively speak other dialects of German. You cannot use this construction in writing!
FWIW and while not disagreeing with a single thing you wrote in my quote above, I think it's a really beautiful construction.
Josquin wrote:You may find it hard to believe, but it actually is the case. The natural instinct is to use dative after a lot of prepositions, however in school we're taught that "wegen" and so on take genitive. The result is that people think dative after more elaborate prepositions (such as "entgegen", "entsprechend", etc.) is always wrong and they use the genitive when dative would be correct. This is a common mistake in writing, but it's already spreading in spoken language as well.
This is a common phenomenon in languages, called "hypercorrection". You can also find it in English when people say: "Greetings from my wife and I". People get corrected when they use "my wife and me" as a subject ("My wife and me are expecting a baby"), so they think it has always got to be "my wife and I" even when "my wife and me" would be correct (as an object or after prepositions). Robbie Williams even sings: "This is the end for you and I", which really makes me cringe...
It was actually learning German that stopped me doing this.
I agree with your analysis; but I would guess (without having heard the song) RW was probably trying to make a rhyme. I think it's OK for artists to use non-standard grammar from the colloquial language for artistic purposes.
Josquin wrote:The second point I want to make is that I agree that for native speakers case systems has meaning. The meaning is above all grammatical. As I attempted to point out with a few examples things can be wrong grammatically but totally understandable.
Yeah, you're completely understandable, but you'd sound like Tarzan. Just as Russians omitting English articles, Englishmen ignoring French gender, or Germans replacing the subjonctif by the indicatif.
Totally. These things may or may not be necessary in the Modern language with its stricter word order in order to be understood; but they are necessary in order to allow your interlocutor to
effortlessly figure out what you mean. If something exists in a language, however marginal its utility may or may not be, speakers will be using it as cues.
We don't even have to guess what it sounds like, because case exists in English!
He bought I an ice cream.
Terry already told she.
Will you give it to he?
This isn't for we; it's for they.
All as perfectly understandable as "*ich sehe der Mann" and all avery ugly and really annoying precisely because English speakers are cued into this distinction, expect it and therefore use it in their heuristics for parsing sentences. For a language with a simple case system like German or Modern Greek, the only difficulty for English speakers is transferring this case sensitivity from the pronoun system to the noun system. A few weeks constantly asking yourself "What pronoun?" can help here, so can FSI drills.
You know Chinglish is interesting (I know it seems I'm going off topic here, but bear with me): once you get your head round it, it is easy to understand. English really could work like this if everyone agreed. And yet, for your first few months in China, staring at signs purporting to be in English and spending several seconds figuring out the meaning is an enjoyable pastime. In a conversation, you don't really want that delay in comprehension.
Why does it exist (at least until you get used to it)?
It's well known that in languages where the verb changes to indicate the subject the subject, pronouns are usually optional [insert standard examples from Spanish and Italian]. This makes sense, right? It's also well known and logical that languages like English or
spoken French, where the verb changes a little, tend to require them. Again this makes perfect sense, they are plugging an information gap as the verb system gets simplified.
What is less obviously logical (and perhaps less well known) is that languages where the verb doesn't change
at all usually can also omit subject pronouns from a verb phrase! This made no sense to me at all. Then one day, reading a sign in Chinglish around the time when my comprehension of this medium of communication was starting to become less laboured, I had an epiphany. The sign was this:
May every corner have happinessI realised that the reason for my very brief misunderstanding was that I was looking for an overt subject that wasn't there and so my Anglophone brain interpreted "every corner" as the subject. Then common sense and my experience with Chinglish got together and pointed out that it was almost certain that the subject was surely intended to be the reader (who we all hope will experience happiness at every corner in life).
Spanish speakers can usually get the necessary information from the verb and so can usually leave subject pronouns out, Chinese speakers sometimes can get all the information from context and so can sometimes leave the subject pronouns out; but English speakers are stuck in limbo: there's just enough information on the verb to tempt you to direct your attention to grammatical form instead of context when figuring out the subject but not enough to make this really efficient. Enter a ridgid "obligatory overt subject" rule to fill the gap.
I think this odd situation is a good analogy for the German case system. There is no case in Chinese and you can't speak comprehensible Russian without some grasp of the case system (from what I hear); but German is in that strange limbo with its cases where English is with its verbs. Your German will be perfectly comprehensible if you ignore cases; but reading it will get old quickly unless what you are saying is interesting enough to make up for it.
Note that none of this applies to making mistakes. Using cases but making the occasional error is almost certainly not annoying to native interlocutors (I await confirmation from natives). I don't find it annoying when Chinese speakers of good English (for example) occasionally mix up he and she; I do find it incredibly annoying when Chinese speakers of bad English don't even try to use the distinction (understanding them is perfectly possible but takes effort). From what I understand, they feel the same way about tones when we speak Chinese: the occasional error is inevitable and often amusing and doesn't normally make you hard to understand; input from an L2 speaker not using tones properly at all is really difficult to understand.
Does any of this make sense?