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The sentence "Ich war dir egal", is translated in English as "You didn't care about me". Why in the translation "Ich" and "dir" exchange its position? Why it not translated as "I didn't care about you"?

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  • I guess "I didn't care about you"? Means the opposite of "Ich war dir egal"
    – Bernhard Döbler
    Commented Sep 19 at 23:11
  • It's not about position, it's about what's subject (nominative in the German sentence) and what's object (dative in the German sentence). The way this question is worded invites anwers like PMF's which is formally correct but does not really answer the question.
    – RHa
    Commented Sep 20 at 16:12

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This translation is a free one, as English lacks the identical construction.

You didn't care about me.

This is: you (the subject of the sentence) underwent a certain activity, "to care (about)", and this activity is directed towards me as its recipient.

Ich bin dir egal.

This is different: I (the subject of this sentence) have a certain attribute, namely to be "egal" (for this there is no real equivalent in English, "of no concern" comes close). The "dir" describes towards whom I have this attribute: To whom I am of no concern? To you!

Addendum: the reason why German can have subject and object of a sentence exchanged, like:

Ich war dir egal.
Dir war ich egal.

is because Kasus are marked clearly in German whereas in English they aren't, in fact the don't even exist in general. With personal pronouns you still see them: would "I", a subject, act as an object, it would be "me". This is not the case with nouns in general and hence there is a fixed placement within the sentence which makes a certain noun the subject and another one the object.

In German this is different, because endings and/or articles make clear which Kasus is used and hence what is the subject (the one in Nominativ) and what is object (the one in Genitiv/Dativ/Akkusativ). e.g.:

A knows B.
B knows A.

Who knows who depends only upon placement.

Der A kennt den B.
Den B kennt der A.

German marks the Kasus and hence subject and object can be exchanged and still recognized for what they are.

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  • Note: feminine nouns are not clearly marked in accusative. Die Katze frisst die Maus.
    – Olafant
    Commented Sep 18 at 11:54
  • @Olafant: this is true and one of the reasons German sentence structure is less variable then e.g. Latin. Generally speaking the richer your inflection system is the less structured your sentences have to be.
    – bakunin
    Commented Sep 18 at 12:32
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That is because the verb sich sorgen – to care, to worry has a very different meaning in German in this context

Ich sorge mich nicht um dich.

I don't worry about you (as you will be fine).

So you have to rephrase

Du bist mir egal/gleich.

You don't matter to me.

or, in your example:

Ich war dir egal.

I didn't matter to you.

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The most literal way to translate "egal" is "unimportant".

  • "Das ist mir egal." = "That is unimportant to me."
  • "Ich war dir egal." = "I was unimportant to you."

This doesn't sound very natural in English, so it is better to translate it as "not care" and switch the subject and object; but if you want to understand the grammar, this literal translation probably helps.

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In German, object and subject can change their position without really affecting the meaning.

So the phrases

Ich war dir egal

and

Dir war ich egal

mean the same. The only change is the emphasis, which now changed from "me" to "you". The translation is now closer, but still isn't possible literaly.

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