Hier ist der Prospekt vom Tiergarten. (en → de) Topic is solved

[sentence bot 🤖]

Hier ist der Prospekt vom Tiergarten.

en: Here is the brochure from the zoo.

Duolingo forum topic: https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/56277663

[Seiryuu]

Why isn't "Here is the zoo's brochure" acceptable here? Wouldn't this be dative possession?

[Chrisinom]

Why isn't "Here is the zoo's brochure" acceptable here? Wouldn't this be dative possession?

"The zoo's brochure" is genitive, the so-called Saxon genitive. In German this is "der Prospekt des Tiergartens/Zoos". I wouldn't use the from+dative construction in written German, although from+dative is used by the majority of German speakers in an informal context. There is a general tendency of the German language to use dative instead of genitive. The genitive object ("ich erinnere mich deiner") is extinct by now. There is a book about this phenomenon titled "Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod". The title makes fun of a form even worse than von+dative. Quite a lot of people nowadays say things like "Meinem Bruder sein Auto".
By the way: What about "zoo brochure"?

[mathemajician]

Why isn't "Here is the zoo's brochure" acceptable here? Wouldn't this be dative possession?

Quite a lot of people nowadays say things like "Meinem Bruder sein Auto".

That's really interesting, I was just reading an article about Pennsylvania Dutch and that's similar to what the article said about possession there.

"The historical genitive case has been replaced by the dative, and possession is indicated with a special construction using the dative and the possessive pronoun: 'the man's dog' becomes em Mann sei Hund (literally: 'to the man his dog'). Studies have shown variability in the use of the dative case in both sectarian and non-sectarian communities. The trend is towards use of the common case for nouns and the accusative case for pronouns, instead of the dative. Thus, em Mann sei Hund, for example, has frequently become der Mann sei Hund."

[Chrisinom]

Maybe this is an old form of the emigrants' spoken dialect. The process behind all that is a general trend to drop the case endings in German. What is happening is more or less the same thing that happened to English long ago: Due to the initial accent of Germanic words, endings are weakened and eventually dropped. Schiller's "Die Räuber" (1781) ended with the words "Dem Manne kann geholfen werden." Today it's dem Mann. Even Der Mann and den Mann are turning into something like "de Mann" in spoken language. Likewise with Verbs: gehen is spoken as gehn, ich gehe becomes ich geh. With the growing importance of English and the increase of immigration to Germany, the tendency to simplify supports this development.