daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic
| Message 9 of 71 10 January 2014 at 8:47pm | IP Logged |
Searching for "bin geboren wurde geboren" on google.de gets you some discussions by
native speakers on the topic. Not sure if there is a definite answer.
"wann sind Sie geboren worden" is just the perfect tense variant of "wann wurden Sie
geboren" (which is preterite).
Quote:
you wouldn't ask, "Wann ist die Tür geschlossen?" when you want go know when it got
closed by somebody, would you?
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No, you wouldn't. But you can ask this question. It means: "when is the door usually
closed?" Here again, it seems like we are asking about the attribute 'being closed'.
Again, I can't really explain it, but you could see the question with 'geboren sein' as a
question for an attribute like 'What is your birth date?".
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daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic
| Message 10 of 71 10 January 2014 at 8:55pm | IP Logged |
On a related note, in Norwegian and Danish you can ask "Når er du født?" which
translates exactly as "Wann bist du geboren?". So either they loaned that expression
from German (which is very possible) or this way of asking got lost in English.
But then, googling for "when are you born" will show up results.
By the way, you also say "Ich bin am ... geboren." unlike the English "I was born on
...".
Edited by daegga on 10 January 2014 at 9:01pm
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5322 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 11 of 71 10 January 2014 at 9:01pm | IP Logged |
According to the Duden, "ich bin geboren" can only be used with a place:
Ich in bin in Hamburg geboren.
while "ich wurde geboren" can be used both with a time and a place:
Ich wurde am 01. 01. 1999 in Hamburg geboren.
IMHO, non-native speakers are better off using "ich wurde geboren."
BTW, in informal German, you're more likely to hear "Wie alt bist Du?" and "Wann hast Du Geburtstag?"
Edited by Doitsujin on 10 January 2014 at 10:09pm
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Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5785 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German
| Message 12 of 71 10 January 2014 at 9:14pm | IP Logged |
So is "Wann bist du geboren?" wrong in the standard language? That'd leave me absolutely gutted as it
turned up in a sentence collection that I'm learning on memrise. :-(
Is it an Austrian thing?
Edited by Random review on 10 January 2014 at 9:31pm
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daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic
| Message 13 of 71 10 January 2014 at 9:34pm | IP Logged |
Doitsujin wrote:
According to the Duden, "ich bin geboren" can only be used with a
place:
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Could that be outdated?
on http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/wann_dann_wenn:
Quote:
interrogativ; zu welchem Zeitpunkt, zu welcher Zeit?
Grammatik
temporal
Beispiele
wann kommt er?
wann bist du geboren?
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Doitsujin Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5322 days ago 1256 posts - 2363 votes Speaks: German*, English
| Message 14 of 71 10 January 2014 at 10:05pm | IP Logged |
I don't think so. Duden:
...
ich wurde am 11. November 1971 in Köln geboren
...
While you might occasionally find "ich bin geboren" I still recommend "ich wurde geboren."
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daegga Tetraglot Senior Member Austria lang-8.com/553301 Joined 4523 days ago 1076 posts - 1792 votes Speaks: German*, EnglishC2, Swedish, Norwegian Studies: Danish, French, Finnish, Icelandic
| Message 15 of 71 10 January 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
Oh, I didn't mean "wurde geboren" to be outdated, just the restriction of "bin geboren"
to places. I would prefer "wurde geboren" in writing myself.
Now in spoken German, there is the tendency to use perfect tense, in the South
exclusively, in Middle Germany predominantly and in the North I think it's rule bound
(like in English). So for many of us, the choice would be between "Ich bin geboren" and
"Ich bin geboren worden". If the first one can be used for places (so it's not
inherently wrong), a shift in the last 30 years from the longer version to the shorter
one also when talking about time seems plausible (as even Duden uses it in an example at
least for the question). Whether this really happened I of course don't know. But I also
wouldn't expect Duden to do new corpus analyses for all their claims every few years.
Edited by daegga on 10 January 2014 at 10:27pm
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Random review Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5785 days ago 781 posts - 1310 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Portuguese, Mandarin, Yiddish, German
| Message 16 of 71 10 January 2014 at 10:26pm | IP Logged |
Somethng interesting is going on here. I've been searching on other sites such as wordreference and it is
clear that native speakers can't agree on this amongst themselves! Also, I saw an interesting example
sentence:
Ich bin so geboren
Which I understand to mean "I was born this way" yet nevertheless to be commenting on how I am now
(whereas I would understand the sentence with werden [ich wurde so geboren] to literally describe how I
was when I was born).
Deeper and deeper down the rabbit hole...
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