[tlhIngan Hol] {'e' qa'} "instead of" with quotations

[Steven Boozer]

Thanks for the explanation of *es gibt".  I don't know where I got *es geben* from.  

I 'll take your word for it that there are no contractions of verb forms in Standard German but what about non-standard regional dialects (High vs. Low German) both in Germany and abroad (Austria, Switzerland, Alsace, the Netherlands, the Baltics, etc.); the speech of the uneducated and other low-class sociolects; not to mention the old-fashioned German spoken by various emigrant groups like the *Wolgadeutschen* and *Russlandmennoniten* in Russia, the Old-Order Amish and Mennonites (who both speak what is called "Pennsylvania Dutch" in the US), and elsewhere?

Like Spanish *hay* there's only one form in Russian ( есть *yest'*) and the similar-sounding but linguistically-unrelated Hebrew ( יש *yesh*) as well.  

Voragh

-----------------------------------Original Message----------------------------------------
From: tlhIngan-Hol On Behalf Of luis.chaparro at web.de

Voragh:
> Lieven & De'vId, is there similar confusion in colloquial or regional 
> German between "es gibt" and "es geben"? For that matter, are there 
> any contractions of verb forms at all? There are in Yiddish, cf. for 
> example 
> https://forum.duolingo.com/comment/48848424/contractions-in-yiddish    

Maybe I can help here. In German there is only the form *es gibt* for *there is / are*. It's a fixed structure, where *es* is a 3rd person singular subject (but with no semantic meaning here) and therefore the verb always remains singular (*gibt*). It takes an accusative object:

*Es gibt einen neuen Film* 	(*There is a new movie*) 
*Es gibt zwei neue Filme* 	(*There are two new movies*)

There are no contractions of verb forms like in English.

By the way, in Spanish there is also only one form (*hay*) for singular or plural.