Hi
Ich stellte den Stuhl auf den Boden vor die Tür/vor der Tür.
Does the accusative case still apply to vor…Tür or only to aux…Boden? What is the rule when it comes to sequences of prepositional phrasing?
I’m actively placing the chair on the floor and putting it in front of the door. So it appears to require the accusative case throughout the sentence.If it doesn’t apply, why not?
I look forward to your feedback.
Because you are saying where you are placing it, it is accusative. Here’s a pretty good summary.
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It is easier if you only look at the “vor” and “auf” and disregard the rest of the sentence.
Thank you Maserschmidt and The Librarian. Very helpful.
I’m still confused.
Do Tür and Boden necessarily both need to be in the accusative?
When the chair is placed on the floor, that clearly requires the accusative case. But the floor itself simply exists in front of the door, so I would have thought that it should be derTür. That’s just my interpretation, though.
Or would this come down to a matter of style, with some native speakers preferring it one way while others prefer the other way?
Missed the edit window: With regard to style, it makes much more sense to me to write Ich stellte den Stuhl vor die Tür, since it can be assumed that I put the chair on the floor.
True.
But that was not the question:)
“auf” is 3rd of 4th fall. it depends if it is describing a position or an act.
This rule explains why both Tür and Boden is in the 4th Fall.
To clarify, 4th case means Accusative, right?
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Yes. German cases:
First case: nominative (Nominativ)
Second case: genitive (Genitiv)
Third case: dative (Dativ)
Fourth case: accusative (Akkusativ)
And to translate them to rough equivalents in English grammar:
First case: nominative (Nominativ) — subject case
Second case: genitive (Genitiv) — possessive case
Third case: dative (Dativ) — indirect object case
Fourth case: accusative (Akkusativ) — direct object case
Maybe quite useful for understanding and to memorize: German children in primary school when first taught about the grammatical cases, learn the following by relating the cases to their respective interrogatives:
First case (nominative) : Wer-Fall
Second case (genetive): Wessen-Fall
Third case (dative): Wem-Fall
Fourth case (accusative): Wen-Fall
Is this case numbering scheme fairly recent in origin? When I began studying German, much longer ago than I care to tell, our teachers and textbooks didn’t use it. Instead, cases were just listed by name, and almost always on the following order: nom-acc-dat-gen. This is probably the most intuitive approach for 2L lanuage learners.
OTOH, books intended for scholarly study, e.g. textbooks on Old English or Old High German did usually use the nom-gen-dat-acc ordering.
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When I was in high schol, we didn’t have the numbering system, but the order was Nominative-Genetive-Dative-Accusative.
I’m a 52 old native German, and I learned this numbering scheme at school. It’s definitely the one used in Germany for a long time, long before my school days.
OK, I looked a bit further, because I was interested how this numbering came to be, and I found this thread onanother message board, with one poster saying:
Sorry, I got no better cite.
ETA: for those who know German, another cite: Nummerierung der 4 Fälle - wer-weiss-was.de
I am a 42 year old native German speaker, and in school we first learned the descriptive terms “Wen-Fall”, “Wem-Fall”, etc. Only later we were taught that there also are latin words (accusativ, etc) for this. The numbering scheme that Einsteins Hund is referring to was also used, but not as frequent, as far as I remember. That might be regional, as each Bundesland has its own schooling regulations, or it might be age. Between the 1970s and 1980s there were vast changes in how things were taught and what was taught in school.
That said: I have mostly forgotten all about which case is called what in latin or in numbers - I could apply the descriptive terms, as they are, of course, descriptive.
With respect to the OT:
I would say that both versions of the sentence are correct.
“Ich stellte den Stuhl auf den Boden vor der Tür.” Here, “vor der Tür” claifies the location of “Boden”.
Ich stellte den Stuhl auf den Boden vor die Tür. Here, “vor die Tür” clarifies the location of my action.
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One traditional Latin order of names goes: nominativus, genetivus, dativus, accusativus, vocativus, ablativus
I don’t know anything about German, but the reason Latin considers the genitive to be the “second case” is because, given a noun’s nominative and genitive forms, you can completely determine its declension and root, and thus determine all of its other forms.
The full order I learned was nominative, genitive, dative, accusative, ablative, with the much more rarely used vocative and locative not really part of the order, but just sort of floating around elsewhere. And it’s hardly surprising that German would lack an equivalent of the ablative, since all it was used for was the object of some prepositions, but other prepositions just use the accusative.
Of course other languages have other traditional orderings, and a particular book might use a different order anyway. But it is not implausible that someone writing a German grammar may have copied the order and even the names of the cases found in well-known Latin and Greek textbooks. The question is which influential German grammar this might be, or if multiple authors independently adhered to it.