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FAQ-NL: Dutch | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Specific Languages |  | |
| nimchimpsky Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5430 days ago 73 posts - 108 votes  Speaks: Dutch*, English | Message 473 of 509 09 March 2013 at 4:56pm | IP Logged | |||||
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'ne' is a plural. There is no n at the end becasue we have only one queen. Likewise we spell 'zonnebril' because we have only one sun or 'maneschijn' because we have only one moon. Why we have decided to call it 'koningsdag' is something I don't know. Edited by nimchimpsky on 09 March 2013 at 4:57pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tommus Senior Member CanadaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5685 days ago 979 posts - 1688 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Dutch, French, Esperanto, German, Spanish | Message 474 of 509 11 March 2013 at 12:15am | IP Logged | |||||
How can 'ne' be a plural if it refers to only one queen? To me (and I don't know), it seems that 'ne' is the singular possessive and 'nen' is the plural possessive, as in 'the day of the queen' or if it were something else like the 'city of the queens", then "nen'. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4526 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 475 of 509 11 March 2013 at 12:29am | IP Logged | |||||
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He's made a typo. But that rule you talk about is the subject of much debate among Dutch
linguists and nobody ever knows how to spell those words correctly, so if you do it wrong, no worries, nobody else gets it right either (me included.) 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| nimchimpsky Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5430 days ago 73 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English | Message 476 of 509 11 March 2013 at 1:23pm | IP Logged | |||||
So why do we spell 'zonnebril' according to you? The glasses obviously don't belong to the sun. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4526 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 477 of 509 12 March 2013 at 11:30am | IP Logged | |||||
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At this point, ninchimpsky, it's pretty much a moot point; spelling is a way of
convention in these cases because they're useful daily objects everyone knows. I would say zonnebril because we're only protecting against one sun (and not 24). Those compound words "belong together" in a grammatical sense even if there is no explicit notion of possession involved. Just like saying "het meisje" (neuter) doesn't imply that all women are not of feminine gender, but it's just a grammatical construct demanded by using the diminutive. Edited by tarvos on 12 March 2013 at 11:31am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Josquin Heptaglot Senior Member Germany Joined 4663 days ago 2266 posts - 3992 votes Speaks: German*, English, French, Latin, Italian, Russian, Swedish Studies: Japanese, Irish, Portuguese, Persian | Message 478 of 509 12 March 2013 at 12:15pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I don't know if this helps, but in German we speak of "Fugenlaute" ("joint sounds") that connect the components of compound words, especially "Fugen-n", "Fugen-e", and "Fugen-s". That's why we say "Sonnenbrille" although the single components are "Sonne" and "Brille". I imagine there might be a similar phenomenon in Dutch.
I think these compounds originally developed from genitives, at least that's still the case in Icelandic. The famous volcano "Eyjafjallajökull", which brought European air traffic to a standstill in 2010, is a compound word. "Eyja" and "fjalla" are genitive plural of "ey" ("island") and "fjall" ("mountain"), and the entire word means "island-mountain-glacier". One can also detect old genitive forms in Swedish compound words such as "kyrkogård" ("cemetery"). "Kyrko" is the old feminine genitive of "kyrka" ("church"). My Dutch is not good enough to say anything about the formation of compound words there, but I guess the historical processes which formed compound words might be similar to German, Icelandic, Swedish, and other Germanic languages. 4 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4526 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 479 of 509 12 March 2013 at 1:12pm | IP Logged | |||||
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Probably, but most of these forms are quite fixed, and they have been changed back and
forth during numerous spelling reforms over the last fifty years. The result is a mess that nobody wants to take control of, and it becomes even worse when you realise the newspapers use a different standard than the Taalunie. Dutch orthography is a nightmare in that sense. A genitive expresses belonging in a certain way, so it seems a logical point of departure (and the genitive or dative is used in some fixed expressions in Dutch, although it's not recognised as such but it's become idiomatic). There is probably a good linguistic reason, but it's beyond my scope to give an answer to that question - I'm not a linguist. Edited by tarvos on 12 March 2013 at 1:25pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| nimchimpsky Diglot Groupie Netherlands Joined 5430 days ago 73 posts - 108 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English | Message 480 of 509 12 March 2013 at 8:34pm | IP Logged | |||||
I still think it is a plural formed by analogy with its predecessor 'prinsessedag'. Cases were dead long before this compound was formed but I am no linguist either of course. I also think that the 'e' aids pronunciation. That would explain why we say 'erwtensoep' but 'worteltaart'. I don't know how to classify consonants but I suspect that some require linking. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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