New answers tagged dative
5
The gist of it is that googles automatic translation looks like it was trained on the corpus of public domain, i.e. about hundred years old books.
Nobody talks like that, perhaps because it would be ambiguous under the theoretically free word order. In practice, there are idiomatic preferences.
Ich kaufe Schmuck meiner Freundin
I buy jewelery of my ...
2
In probably any language, context is very important. Sentences can be ambigous, especially if you look at them isolated. In those cases, you need to use your knowledge about the situation, about the current topic of the conversation and so forth, to decide which meaning has been intended. That knowledge is "stored" in the context.
Let's look at ...
2
There is a grammatical ambiguity.
However, most would understand it as dative, buying for the girlfriend. I first had to verify whether it really could be interpreted as genitive. So in my opinion, there is no need to rephrase it. But I would prefer " Ich kaufe Schmuck für meine Freundin."
To express that you want to by from your girlfriend, I ...
2
Indeed, the sentence can be interpreted in two ways.
However, the translation that Google provided is very old-styled and hardly used in spoken language.
I don't think that anybody would use this meaning, unless in a poem or a very lyrical piece of text. But then, it will be obvious by the context. So usually, I don't think that it will be misunderstood.
If ...
1
Welcome to German SE! This has already been answered pretty well in the comments, but I'll add an actual answer for good form. Yes, you did correctly identify the accusative object "the pen" and the dative object "her". This can be confusing for English speakers learning German because English does not really distinguish between these ...
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