Grammatica, episode nine. Aanwijzende voornaamwoorden - demonstrative pronouns. This, that, these, those. English has four words. Dutch has four words. Unfortunately they don't line up one to one, because Dutch splits them by grammatical gender as well as by distance.
The good news: it's a two-by-two grid with four cells, and there are no exceptions. Ten minutes now and it's done for good.
Two questions decide everything. Is the thing near or far? And is the noun a de-word or a het-word? Here are the four answers. Near and de: deze. Far and de: die. Near and het: dit. Far and het: dat.
deze die dit dat
In practice:
deze man die man dit boek dat boek
This man, that man - de man. This book, that book - het boek.
Two memory hooks, both of them real patterns rather than tricks. First: the near words carry a t or a z. Deze and dit both have one. Die and dat don't - they're the far pair, and they're the plainer sound.
deze dit. die dat. — Near, near.
Far, far. Say them a few times and the shape sticks - the near ones feel sharper in the mouth.
Second hook, and this is the useful one. The het-words echo their own article. Het, dit, dat - all three have that flat t ending. De-words take deze and die, which don't.
het boek dit boek dat boek. — So if you know the article, you already know the pointer.
Which is the whole reason people keep telling you to learn Dutch nouns with their article attached. It isn't pedantry - the article is load-bearing, and this is one of the places it pays out.
Now the part that makes this easier than it looks. In the plural, the het-forms vanish completely. Every plural noun in Dutch takes de, so every plural pointer is deze or die. Dit and dat are singular-only.
dit boek deze boeken.
This book, these books. The singular is dit because boek is a het-word. The plural is deze, because there are no het-plurals to worry about.
dat huis die huizen.
That house, those houses. So the four-cell grid is really only four cells in the singular. In the plural it collapses to two: deze for these, die for those. Half the problem disappears.
The exam-shaped difficulty is mixing genders in one breath. Try this:
deze schoenen en dit shirt. — These shoes and this shirt.
Deze because schoenen is plural, dit because shirt is a het-word. And one more, mixing distance as well as gender:
Die man wil dit boek.
That man wants this book. Die - de-word, far. Dit - het-word, near. Two axes running at once in six words.
One last thing. Die and dat also work as pronouns with no noun after them at all, and Dutch uses them this way constantly where English would say the one or he who.
Welke wil je? Die. — Which do you want? That one.
Bare die, no noun. And in more formal or proverbial Dutch, die on its own can mean the person who - which brings us neatly to today's proverb.
Today's Brueghel proverb, which opens on exactly that construction.
Die zijn pap gemorst heeft, kan niet alles weer oprapen.
Die zijn pap gemorst heeft, kan niet alles weer oprapen.
Literally: he who has spilled his porridge cannot pick it all up again. Meaning: damage done can never be completely undone. And there's our word doing its second job - that opening die is not pointing at a noun, it means whoever. Example:
Sorry helpt nu niet meer. Die zijn pap gemorst heeft, kan niet alles weer oprapen. — An apology won't fix it now.
Some things don't go back.
That's episode nine.
Prettige dag verder!
Download anki.tsv and import into Anki (File → Import). Tab-separated Front/Back/Tags.