possessive marking

[Hartmut Haberland]

A construction similar to the one in Turkish is very common in
colloquial German. I found an example (quote from a talk show) in an
article of Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich) of August 7/8, 1999, p. 18:

"Es ist nicht dem Bürger seine Schuld, wenn er keine Arbeit hat, sondern
den Politikern."

It is not the-DAT.SG citizen-DAT.SG his fault, if he no work has, but
the-DAT.PL politicians-DAT.PL [sc. their fault]

"It is not the fault of the citizen if he is unemployed but [the fault]
of the politicians."

dem		Bürger			seine 		Schuld
DEF.DAT.SG	citizen.DAT.SG		his.NOM.SG	fault.NOM.SG

den		Politikern		[ihre		Schuld]
DEF.DAT.PL	politicians.DAT.PL	their.NON.SG	fault.NOM.SG

Thus the head (possessed) gets a marking by possessive pronoun, and the
possessor is marked by Dative case.

An anecdote which highlights this: in front of the Central Station in
Hanover, Germany, there is an equestrian statue of the extremely
unpopular Hannoverian King Ernst August (king 1837-1851). Ernest August
was an English prince who became king of Hanover when the personal union
between Hanover and England was discontinued because a woman (Queen
Victoria) couldn't become heir to the Hanoverian throne. The Hanoverians
imported him in spite of his bad reputation (a London newspaper had
written about him, "Prince Ernest August indulges in every conceivable
vice, unfortunately with one exception: suicide"). He became famous when
he fired seven Professors of Göttingen University and exiled three of
them, among them the Grimm brothers. The plinth of the statue bears the
inscription DEM LANDESVATER SEIN TREUES VOLK, i.e. "[dedicated to] the
father of the country [by] his loyal people". But you can also read the
inscription as a case of the possessor-possessive construction, in which
case it means "the loyal people of the Father of the Country". People
used to joke about this, "what does this mean? It'm him, not his people!
Why does it say it's his people!"

Hartmut Haberland