Archives and records

An archive does not keep everything. Most of what an office produces is destroyed after appraisal, and the German verb for that step, kassieren, sounds as brisk as it is. What survives is the result of die Überlieferungsbildung, and a gap in the record is often a choice somebody made. The person who makes it is der Archivar, and the word is worth a moment’s grammar. Masculine nouns for people that came in from Latin are often weak — der Jurist, dem Juristen; der Doktorand, den Doktoranden — and learners carry that pattern over. Most of those in -ar decline the ordinary strong way instead: des Archivars, dem Archivar, plural die Archivare. Der Bibliothekar and der Notar behave the same. So a letter goes to dem Archivar, never to dem Archivaren, and the feminine is simply die Archivarin.