| “Follow-up question for German speakers: I was sometimes asked 'When were you born?' as 'Wann bist du geboren?' which would be a word-for-word translation of the English. Is 'Wann wurdest du geboren?' with the passive auxiliary the only really correct form?” Both “bist geboren” and “wurdest geboren” are in wide-spread use, some German speakers prefer the one, some the other variant – e.g. https://dict.leo.org/forum/viewGeneraldiscussion.php?idThrea... – but not under all circumstances: - “wurdest geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “werden” is called “Vorgangspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing an event’. - “bist geboren”: the passive with an auxiliary form of “sein” is called “Zustandspassiv” ≈ ‘passive expressing a state’. A minimal pair: - “Die Tür wird geöffnet” = ‘The door is opened’. - “Die Tür ist geöffnet” ≈ ‘The door (has been opened and) is open’ (There is also “Die Tür ist offen” = ‘The door is open’). So “wurdest geboren” and “bist geboren” offer two different perspectives (with a difference that often doesnʼt really matter): - “Wann wurdest du geboren?” focuses on the past event of having been born at a certain time. - “Wann bist du geboren?” focuses on the personʼs property to be now a person that was born at a certain time (a property, in the end, like age or weight maybe). So the latter is rather not used for dead persons: “Kant wurde 1724 geboren” is much preferred over “Kant ist 1724 geboren”. (If students of the German language donʼt want to memorize much here, they can, as often with German, happily apply the postmodern motto “anything goes”, plus there is probably some dialect anyway in which the form you use is the right one since the middle ages :-) |