Meine Schwester hat ein sehr gutes Gehirn.

Sentence Discussions German
#1
English Translation

My sister has a very good brain.

why is Gehirn in Nominativ case? isnt it the direct object for the verb “hat”? i know that the declination will still be the same so it doesn’t matter but the explanation says it is in nominativ which confuses me

#2

Did ChatGPT tell you that? It’s wrong. It’s in the accusative case. And you’re right, it looks exactly the same as nominative because Gehirn is neuter.

#3

I assume you mean the “Explain” feature, which is powered by ChatGPT.

As @pitti42 already said: ChatGPT is wrong.

  • To find out the Nominativ part of the sentence, you ask “Wer oder was?”
    • Wer (oder was) hat ein gutes Gehirn? Meine Schwester.
  • To find out the Akkusativ part of the sentence, you ask “Wen oder was?”
    • Wen (oder was) hat meine Schwester? Ein sehr gutes Gehirn.

Therefore:

  • Gehirn is Akkusativ.
  • The Nominativ is “Schwester”, not “Gehirn”.

This shows yet again that what is sold to us as “artificial intelligence” is unreliable.

1 Like
#4

With german having a flexible word order, and “Gehirn” looking like nominative, and “Schwester” being identical in accusative, theoretically this could also be interpreted as “a brain” having “my sister”, i.e. OVS instead of SVO. Of course this doesn’t make much sense, so most everyone will see SVO (subject-verb-object) here.