Grammatica, episode eight. One small word: aan. Three letters, and it turns up in four unrelated jobs plus a shelf of fixed expressions. Prepositions are where languages stop making sense to each other, so some of this is memorisation - but rather less than it first appears.
Sense one, and the root of the rest: attachment. Aan is contact by hanging, sticking, or being fastened to something.
De lamp hangt aan het plafond. — The lamp hangs from the ceiling.
Note that English switches to from there and Dutch stays with aan. The image is the join itself, not the direction. And idiomatically it covers being seated at a table:
Wij zitten aan tafel.
Which raises the question every learner asks: aan or op? The line is cleaner than you'd fear. Aan means hanging or attached. Op means resting on top of a surface.
De jas hangt aan de kapstok. De jas ligt op de stoel. — The coat hangs on the peg.
The coat lies on the chair. Both are on in English; in Dutch one is a hook and the other is a horizontal surface. Once you picture it, most cases decide themselves.
Sense two: switched on. The opposite here is uit, off.
De tv staat aan. Doe het licht aan. — The TV is on.
Turn the light on. And note the verb Dutch chooses. Appliances staan aan - they stand on. They do not zijn aan. De verwarming staat aan, the heating is on. Dutch is fond of giving inanimate objects a posture; things stand, lie, sit, and hang far more than English lets them.
Sense three: the recipient. Aan marks who gets something.
Geef het boek aan mij. Ik schrijf een brief aan de gemeente. — Give the book to me.
I'm writing a letter to the council. This one is often optional - geef mij het boek works equally well, with the aan dropped and the order swapped. Keeping the aan puts a little more weight on who receives it.
Now the one worth the episode. Dutch has no continuous tense. Ik kook covers both I cook and I am cooking, and most of the time that's fine. But when you need to insist that something is happening right at this moment, the construction is zijn plus aan het plus an infinitive.
Ik ben aan het koken. — I am cooking, right now, this minute.
Zij zijn aan het werken. — They're working.
Three fixed pieces - a form of zijn, then aan het, then the plain verb. It doesn't change and it doesn't inflect. This is the closest Dutch comes to the English -ing, and it's the single most useful thing aan does.
Then there are the verbs that simply demand aan, with no logic to derive it from. Denken aan is to think about.
Ik denk vaak aan mijn oma. — I often think about my grandmother.
Not over - nadenken over is the deliberate, mulling-it-over kind of thinking. Denken aan is having someone in mind. Wennen aan is to get used to:
Ik moet nog wennen aan het weer. — I still have to get used to the weather.
And meedoen aan is to take part in. These pairings have to be memorised as units. There's no rule waiting to be discovered - every language does this, and the only cure is repetition.
Finally the separable verbs built on aan, several of which you'll need at a counter. Aandoen is to put on or switch on. Aankomen is to arrive - and it takes zijn in the perfect: de trein is aangekomen. Aanbieden is to offer. And zich aanmelden is to register, reflexively:
Ik moet me aanmelden bij de gemeente. — I have to register with the council.
After the modal moet, the separable verb stays whole at the end - but the reflexive me still has to be in there. Drop it and the sentence collapses.
Today's Brueghel proverb, and it opens with our word.
Aan een been knagen.
Aan een been knagen. — Literally: to gnaw on a bone.
Meaning: to keep working away at something long after it has stopped yielding anything. And there's our preposition doing its attachment job - knagen aan, to gnaw at. Example:
Hij knaagt al jaren aan datzelfde been. — He's been chewing on that same problem for years.
That's episode eight.
Fijne avond nog!
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