Grammatica, episode 5: laten
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EN: Grammatica, episode five. One verb: laten. It's a straight cognate of English let, which lulls you into thinking you already know it. You don't. Laten does four separate jobs, and only the first one matches English cleanly. The second one is the one worth the whole episode.
EN: Sense one: permission. Laten plus a bare infinitive (the plain dictionary form of a verb) means allow the action to happen. This is the easy one.
NL: Laat me gaan. <break time="0.8s"/> Laat hem slapen.
EN: Let me go. Let him sleep. Nothing surprising - English does the same thing with the same word.
EN: Sense two: the causative. This is the high-value one, because English has no single word for it. When somebody else does a thing for you, English says have something done or get something done. Dutch just says laten.
NL: Ik laat mijn haar knippen.
EN: I'm getting my hair cut. Not I cut my hair - that would be ik knip mijn haar, and it would mean you did it yourself, with scissors, probably badly.
NL: Ik laat de auto repareren.
EN: I'm having the car repaired. Learn this pattern as a unit: laten plus infinitive equals somebody else does it. It comes up constantly in adult life - the garage, the dentist, the plumber, the council.
EN: Sense three: to leave something as it is. Note carefully - a thing, not a place and not a person.
NL: Laat maar. <break time="0.8s"/> Laat de deur open. <break time="0.8s"/> Laat maar zitten.
EN: Never mind. Leave the door open. Keep the change, or don't bother. Leaving a place is vertrekken or weggaan. Leaving a person is verlaten. Three different English senses of leave, three different Dutch verbs, and laten only covers the object.
EN: Sense four: let's. Built exactly like the English, which is itself a worn-down let us.
NL: Laten we gaan! <break time="0.8s"/> Laten we eten.
EN: Let's go. Let's eat. The form here is laten, with the -en, not laat. Laat we is one of those mistakes that marks you instantly.
EN: Now the family of separable verbs built on laten - and one of them is a trap. Binnenlaten is to let in. Toelaten is to admit or permit. Achterlaten is to leave behind. And uitlaten - which looks like it should mean to let out - actually means to walk the dog.
NL: Ik laat de hond binnen. <break time="1.0s"/> Ik laat de hond uit.
EN: I'm letting the dog in. I'm taking the dog for a walk. Same verb, same dog, opposite particles, and only one of them is about a door.
EN: One more worth having: overlaten aan, to leave something to someone. Laat dat maar aan mij over - leave that to me. You're handing over responsibility, not an object.
EN: Finally, the thing that makes causative laten feel hard. Put a modal in front of it and you stack three verbs at the end of the clause, in an order English would never tolerate.
NL: Ik moet mijn auto laten repareren.
EN: I have to get my car repaired. Moet, laten, repareren - modal, then laten, then the real verb, all queued at the back. Dutch is comfortable with a pile-up of infinitives at the end of a sentence in a way that English simply is not. Get used to the shape and it stops sounding like a mistake.
EN: Today's Brueghel proverb, and it happens to contain our verb.
NL: Zijn licht ergens op laten schijnen.
NL: Zijn licht ergens op laten schijnen.
EN: Literally: to let one's light shine on something. Meaning: to clarify a matter, to explain it. And notice the grammar - laten schijnen, causative laten plus an infinitive, exactly the pattern from sense two. Example:
NL: Kun jij daar je licht eens op laten schijnen?
EN: Could you shed some light on that?
EN: That's episode five.
NL: Prettige dag verder!