Hook and Kimel on God and pronouns #2: grammatical gender

English learners of languages like German, where the sun is referred to as sie (she), or French as il (he), might initially mistake these for anthropomorphisms. Jaroš Griemiller's image (1578) is from Wikimedia. This post is part two in a series looking at Donald Hook and Alvin Kimel's 1993 article, “The Pronouns of Deity: A …

Conjunction agreement after neither/nor and weder/noch clauses in English and German

I have been doing some translating recently and have been having difficulty rendering sentences like this in English: Weder die Historie, die beweist, daß Jesu tatsächlich gelebt hat, noch die Tradition der Kirche, die solches immer schon gelehrt hat, kann und soll dieses Paradox einsichtig machen. I tend to settle with something like this: Neither …

Declension of “Dieser”

I haven't been able to find a good table on Google images for the declension of dieser so I thought I'd make one. Here is both a copiable text one and an image with colour coding. The declension is the same whether dieser is used as a pronoun or a determiner. Masculine Feminine Neuter Plural Nominative dieser …