German Pronouns - Personal Pronouns

Personal Pronouns

The verbs following the formal form of "you"—"Sie"—are conjugated identically as in the first- or third-person plurals (i.e. with the infinitive of the verb). For example, "Sie sprechen Deutsch." This means either "You speak German" or "They speak German", and it is completely up to the context to determine which one it is.

"Ich rufe den Hund"—"Ich rufe ihn" (I am calling the dog—I am calling it. Literally: I am calling him.)

The third-person plural pronoun is used for formal speaking. It can be used to address a single person as well as multiple persons. In the former case, it is capitalized in written German, but pronounced the same when spoken; only the context determines which meaning is intended.

"Ich grüße Sie"

Genitive personal pronouns (which are themselves rather the borrowed genitive forms from the possessive pronouns) never indicate possession, which is not only outdated but wrong. That is, my book translates to "mein Buch", or "das Buch von mir" (the latter would be quite identical to the book of me); and never "das Buch meiner". These pronouns may be used for the genitive object ("gedenke meiner": commemorate me), or the rare instances of genitivus objectivus. Archaically, the unflected possessive pronoun can be used instead, e. g. Vergißmeinnicht (instead of: "vergiß meiner nicht" or – vergessen takes the accusative as well—"vergiss mich nicht" in more modern form). Another place where they are used is after prepositions requiring the genitive case, e. g. "seitens meiner" ("on my part", more typically "meinerseits"). However, many of these prepositions can anyway, at least in more colloquial usage, be constructed with the dative, which however is no personal pronoun issue (e.g. "statt mir" instead of "statt meiner"). Ironically, the Bavarian dialect never uses wegen (because of), which in Standard German must take the genitive, otherwise than with a dative, with the very one exception of personal pronouns, where "wegen meiner" (as indicating "von mir aus", if you bother what I will think about it, it's all right) is not altogether unknown.