Returning to Dutch
class was fun but challenging this week. After a brief recap of
previous topics covered, we dived straight in. Things this week
slipped rapidly into full gear. We have a lot of vocabulary to learn,
and I can see that it might prove difficult unless one applies
oneself diligently.
Culturally we discussed
the Dutch Royal family, and looked at Amsterdam's liberal outlook on
certain issues that are illegal in numerous other countries. A very
interesting debate. One thing mentioned in passing is that if you're
caught pissing into a canal, you can be fined approximately €200.
Of course I had no plans to do this, but definitely now have no plans
to do this in Amsterdam.
Where things really got
interesting was the approach to verbs. I'm making comprehensive notes
here to help myself, breaking it down to understand it better, then
making notes as I build the form of the verb. If anyone else finds
them useful, all the better.
One of the most
daunting things about verbs is that they might seem so different.
Lots of endings, what do they all mean! ARGH!!! However, there's
really nothing to worry about. There is a fair bit to learn in one
night, but the thing is, Dutch is one of the closest linguistic
relatives to English, and so a lot of rules we find in English for
grammar are just the same or similar in Dutch.
Before we go further,
this below all applies to what are known as regular, or weak verbs.
Rules for apply generally with weak verbs, they're not irregular or
strong verbs. Strong verbs have got the strength to stand up and say
“NO! I'm not falling into line and following the rules”, but
we'll come onto them another day. Weak verbs are regular, they're not
strong enough to try and break the rules.
PRESENT TENSE IN ENGLISH AND DUTCH
We need to firstly get
out heads round how we deal with verbs in the present tense.
Let's look first at an
English verb in the present tense:
I work
thou workest
he/she/it works
we work
you work
they work
You're probably
wondering why I'm inclduing THOU. Thou is not used in Modern English,
but I'm including it here as a reminder that there was once more than
one form of YOU in English.
Now let's look at it in
Dutch:
ik werk – I work
jij werkt – you work
(informal)
u werkt – you work
(formal)
hij/zij/het werkt –
he/she/it works
wij werken – we work
jullie werken – you
work(informal plural)
zij werken – they
work
Okay, to recap, we have
the first person, I, or we. Looking out into the world, don't we
always put ourselves first? Yes, we do, at least grammatically. If
you don't put yourself first, you're probably Mother Theresa or the
Pope or something.
The second person: you.
You're probably wondering, why does the Dutch have three words for
you? Well, English used to have three words too, back in the days of
Old English (Anglo-Saxon, before 1066 AD), but English became less
precise, reducing down to "Thou" and "You" in
Shakespeare's time, and now down to just "You". English is
simply less precise when it comes to you, unless you're from Texas,
y'all.
With the third person,
he, she, it, or they. Take particular note of the ending here.
English went with a s in the singular, Dutch went with a T, but you
can link the two in your head if you think of the King James Bible
"He speaketh the word of the Lord". For our purposes, TH is
a sound sort of between the S on the end of works and the T on the
end of werkt for example. Just nod your head and say yes/ja, please.
Hang on, let's just go
back through that list: what's going on here? There's two lots of zij
here:
Zij werkt – she works
Zij werken – they
work
Well, zij (she) and zij
(they) in this instance are homonyms, words that sound the same.
After all, we have homonyms in English, because HEAR and HERE sound
the same.
Okay, so that clarifies
making the weak/regular verb in the present tense.
PAST PARTICIPLE IN ENGLISH
Let's move on to the
past participle. The past participle is, in English, when we use the
perfect tense, so named because it's perfect for driving you mad when
you have studied so much! The past participle is the bit that usually
takes the -ed in such a sentence. In English, the past participle
occurs in constructions such as "I have worked", "I've
worked", "she has worked", and with other verbs like
"We have wanted". Simple, so far. It's the bit that goes at
the end with “-ed” such as "I have X-ed" in English.
So what's all this
about with the GE at the beginning, then? In English, if you say it
quietly enough, you might drop the have. "I worked it through
the grapevine". worked in this instance is the past tense. There
we go again, English being problematic and being ambiguous! "worked"
can either grammatically be past participle form "I have worked"
or past tense "I worked".
Dutch however, likes to
be more precise, and rightfully so. British English unfortunately
revels in ambiguity, compared with Dutch. We'll come back to the past
tense shortly, so let's focus on the past participle. Whereas English
is ambiguous, and we can't tell the difference if presented with the
word "worked" on its own if it grammatically means "I
have worked" (past participle) or "I worked" (past
tense), Dutch is helpful, and has a clear marker on regular verbs for
the past participle: it sticks a ge- in front. Nice pretty marker to
tell you it's come after a have. Now the verb to have is irregular in
Dutch, so we won't go into it yet, but you know what the past
participle is.
So, how does this
relate to English? Well, the fact is, if you go back a thousand
years, English verbs often has ge- at the beginning of past
participles too! The only difference is, in Old English, the g was
often sounded like a y, so softened and died out, and as I understand
it, it survived in only a few English dialects such as in the
following example:
"I've a-heard
you're still rustling cattle," said the Sheriff to Texas Pete.
That "a-heard"
is possibly the remnant of the ge- past participle marker we once had
in Anglo-Saxon.
MAKING THE REGULAR PAST PARTICIPLE WITH 'T KOFSCHIP
Now we move on to
making the past participle in Dutch.
We begin by taking the
verb in the infinitive (the dictionary form, the "to work"
form in this instance) to begin with: werken.
Then we strip it back
to the stam (to use the Dutch
word), or the root (as it's known in English). We drop off the -en.
We now have werk-.
Now
we pop on the ge- at the beginning, and need to look for the ending,
to finish it off. In English, it finishes with -ED, but n Dutch, it
can take either T or D on the end of the past participle.
Building
up so far, we have gewerk-,
but we still don't
have the ending!
Let's
look at the last letter of the stem/root. It's an S in this case. We
check it against the mnemonic 'T
KOFSCHIP - there's an K
there in the magic phrase, so JA, we take the T, producing the past
participle gewerkt.
If it didn't have one of those letters, it would end in -D.
MAKING THE PAST TENSE
So,
we've got the gewerkd past
participle. In order to make the past tense, namely “I worked”,
let's drop the GE from the beginning. In the singular, we add an E to
the end: ik werkde, and in the plural, we add EN. I
worked.
And that's it! Simples really. There are sometimes sound changes which can change the root a little, but perhaps that's for another post on this site, as I'm still trying to get my head around it myself. Ik woon comes from wonen (I live, to live), for example.
And that's it! Simples really. There are sometimes sound changes which can change the root a little, but perhaps that's for another post on this site, as I'm still trying to get my head around it myself. Ik woon comes from wonen (I live, to live), for example.
Join us next week on this site, when I explore deeper into the world
of the language and culture of the Netherlands!