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I was wondering how to decline an English loanword like "Oscar". I know that there are no fixed rules. Sometimes the native declination is adopted, sometimes words are declined according to corresponding German rules.

"The Artist" hat dieses Jahr 5 Oscare gewonnen.
Unter den Gewinnern der Oscars war Angelina Jolie.
Von den Oscaren hatte Meryl Streep auch einen gewonnen.

These examples all sound odd. What would be the grammatically correct way to decline "Oscar" in German?

Takkat
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2 Answers2

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It is done with "s".

11 Oscars gingen an ... (Plural)

Gewinner der Oscars für beste Musik und beste Regie war ... (Genitiv)

Der Film wurde mit den Oscars ... (Dativ)

Ich freue mich auf die Oscars... (Akkusativ)

I do agree that your examples sound odd though. The first one would be fine with s. The second one would be phrased as:

Unter den Oscargewinnern...

The third one would probably be:

Meryl Streep gewann einen der Oscars.

Technically von den Oscars would be correct too, but it doesn't sound good.

Emanuel
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This question is related to the one about English words in German Grammar.

"Oscars" is much more common than "Oscare", as a Google search for the terms

shows.

I don't think there's an alternative to these two. You should be fine with "Oscars".

Community
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elena
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    I'd say much more common is quite an understatement. If you look closer at the search results, then all the (presently 9) results for "oscare gewonnen" that are actually in German are from www.schuleundkultur.ch. And those 3 results in German actually contain the same text. (Soon there'll be some more results from german.se ...) – Hendrik Vogt Feb 27 '12 at 16:06
  • You're right of course. I didn't look closely enough at the results themselves. I just checked how many there were. – elena Feb 28 '12 at 08:23