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I keep reading that cases come from affixes prepositions, how then, did German get cases on its' articles? I wouldn't think "the in dog house" would occur...

The definite article is derived from the demonstrative pronouns, which inflected to agree with the nouns they modified.

And, the use of articles arose when the shifts from Old High German to Middle High German wrecked the original case marking with suffixes, most notably because of V → ə / [-stress]_ (which also simplified conjugation). I imagine the Romance languages developed articles out of demonstrative pronouns for similar reasons?

EDIT: Lookit http://alexmidd.co.uk/Marmaria/ohg/ohg_primer_09.htm!

Abi wrote:I keep reading that cases come from affixes prepositions, how then, did German get cases on its' articles? I wouldn't think "the in dog house" would occur...

I think markedcasogenesis can sometimes be described in terms of affixed prepositionalish particles, but you'd have to go further back in time and see how it worked in Proto-PIE. German, OHG, Proto-Germanic or PIE never had a structure analogous to "the-PREP", they had "the-CASEMARKER". The process through which affixed prepositions become case markers doesn't have to repeat itself in all the daughter languages.