Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 December 30

= December 30 =

German
I've got no knowledge in German 77.125.76.235 (talk) 10:28, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
 * 1. How would you translate into German: "He is from Straubing"?
 * 2. Can the word "Straubingen" be a case form of Straubing (in Greman or in Ancient German)?
 * 3. May one use the form "Straubingen" in sentences like "He is from Straubing" (in Greman or in Ancient German)?
 * 4. May the words "Straubing-Straubingen" be (grammatically) related to each other just as the words "Munich-München" (and likewise) are?
 * 1. Er kommt aus Straubing or Er ist aus Straubing.
 * 2-4. As far as I can tell, you would never use Straubingen in any kind of grammatical context to refer to this particular town. -ingen is simply a common ending for place names, but not in the name of this town. If someone were to say Straubingen, I would assume the person is referring to some other town. --Terfili (talk) 15:11, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Straubingen is apparently a name once used to refer to present-day Straubing near Regensburg. See this article: Ulrich Schmidl. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 23:26, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually, it looks more like a older dative case form of Straubing. See this article: []. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 23:37, 30 December 2011 (UTC)
 * That's more likely to be a variant name than an old dative. Only weak nouns ever had a dative singular in -en, and I don't think any noun ending in -ing was ever weak. Angr (talk) 00:07, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * There seems to be a bit of confusion here about what is a dative form of what: as far as I recall, the -ingen itself is an old Germanic dative ending, used in a locative sense in place names (so a presumed archaic form "Straubingen" would basically mean "place of Straub", who- or whatever Straub may have been). For various reasons, the -ingen ending was shortened to -ing in Bavarian (and I think in English - I may be totally off the mark, but I seem to remember that English place names like Reading share the same etymology) -- Ferkelparade &pi; 01:30, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Addendum: de:-ingen confirms what I just said - it's nice to know that occasionally I'm not completely wrong :P -- Ferkelparade &pi; 01:32, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * My point was just that Straubingen is not synchronically the dative of Straubing (and wasn't in the 18th century either, when the quote at de:Gäuboden was written), even if place names in -ingen did start life as dative plurals. Angr (talk) 02:19, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Aye, and you were certainly correct..sorry, I was barging in a bit prematurely here after I read "Straubing" and "dative", without actually having read the quote at de:Gäuboden. Town/City names in German generally aren't inflected, except the genitive -s and except the odd archaic latinism where a Latin inflection ending is stuck on a German city name. -- Ferkelparade &pi; 02:47, 31 December 2011 (UTC)
 * Regarding your number 4, perhaps I'm missing something here, but how are "Munich" and "München" "grammatically related"? They are in two different languages. "Milano", "Milan" and "Mailand" aren't grammatically related for the same reason, as aren't "Sprengstoff" and "explosive" (to take an example at random). Tonywalton Talk 13:30, 31 December 2011 (UTC)