Sujet : Re: Official German spelling update
De : naddy (at) *nospam* mips.inka.de (Christian Weisgerber)
Groupes : sci.langDate : 14. Jul 2024, 16:55:55
Autres entêtes
Message-ID : <slrnv97pnr.1vh2.naddy@lorvorc.mips.inka.de>
References : 1 2 3 4 5
User-Agent : slrn/1.0.3 (FreeBSD)
On 2024-07-14, Antonio Marques <
no_email@invalid.invalid> wrote:
Could you break down _Vielen Dank_ grammatically for us?
It literally means "many thanks". Whereas the English noun only
exists in the plural (no such thing as expressing "a thank"), the
German one is a mass noun without plural, so the expression is in
the singular. "Dank" is a masculine noun, so the -en agreement
indicates that the noun phrase is in the accusative case. Clearly
it has been extracted from a sentence like "ich schulde Ihnen vielen
Dank" (I owe you many thanks) or such, but nowadays it's a fixed
expression.
Compare "guten Tag!", which is also an elliptical expression in the
accusative case.
-- Christian "naddy" Weisgerber naddy@mips.inka.de