Meetings and committees

One verb on this page behaves quite unlike its English twin. To abstain is sich enthalten, and in its full form it takes neither a preposition nor an accusative but a genitive: sich der Stimme enthalten, literally to hold oneself back from one’s vote. English reaches for « from »; German puts the thing refrained from in the genitive and adds nothing. The same construction lives on outside the meeting room in written German, as in sich jedes Kommentars enthalten, to refrain from any comment. In the minutes the object is usually dropped altogether — zwei Mitglieder enthielten sich — and the noun does the counting: bei drei Enthaltungen angenommen. What a learner should not do is build von der Abstimmung on the English model. The verb is also irregular, enthielt, hat sich enthalten, and its participle looks exactly like the everyday enthalten, to contain, which is the same verb without the reflexive.