"He found none of the hats."
Translation:Er hat keinen der Hüte gefunden.
9 CommentsThis discussion is locked.
1171
Why "keinen" though???
Accusative masculine singular... but referring to what? - the gentive plural Hüte??
Or does "gefunden" cause some kind of dative plural case from all the way at the end there?
Good gosh - it seems I'll only ever be able to speak shirty German, and right now, I'm ok with that.
990
Imagine the genitive "die Hüte" wasn't there. "Er hat keinen (Hut) gefunden", he didn't find a hat. Now the only difference to make the sentence above is that this hat that he didn't find is part of a given collection ;-)
Well, that's my story!
2176
Can someone explain what forces the dative case when this sentence is negative, but if this sentence was positive I believe it would be "Er hat die Hüte gefunden"? Thanks!
943
Unless I misunderstand what's going on in this sentence, there's nothing dative here. "Der Hüte" is genitive. It's not changing because of "none" (the "positive"/"negative" distinction you made), but rather because of "of". If, as was asked about elsewhere in this thread, the sentence was "He has found no hats" instead of "none of the hats", you'd use the accusative ("keine Hüte").