Grammatica, episode 10: af, op, weg =================================== EN: Grammatica, episode ten. Here's a thing about English that should bother you more than it does. A plane takes off. A bird flies off. You write a debt off. You polish off a plate of ribs. One little word, four completely different motions - the plane goes up, the bird goes away, the debt gets subtracted, the ribs get eaten down to nothing. English shrugs and uses off for all four, and you never notice, because it's your language and you stopped looking. EN: Dutch refuses. Dutch looks at those four and says: four directions, four different words. That's the whole idea today. English particles - off, up, out, away - are vague, sprawling things. Dutch particles are little vectors, each one carrying a specific direction. So an English phrasal verb doesn't map onto one Dutch particle. It shatters, and which piece you get depends on the physics of what's actually happening. Three particles: af, op, weg. EN: First: af. Off or down, away from a reference point - and reference point is the important part, because af always implies a from-what. Off what, down from what, subtracted from what. Watch it work on your bank statement. Money leaving your account is afschrijven, to write off. Money arriving is bijschrijven, to write to. NL: afschrijven bijschrijven EN: Every line on a Dutch bank statement is marked af or bij - out or in. The particle is the direction of the money. Three more: NL: afremmen afvallen afstappen EN: Afremmen, to brake - speed taken off. Afvallen, literally to fall off, which is how Dutch says to lose weight. Afstappen, to step off the tram. Off a surface, down from a level, subtracted from an amount. Every one of them is a separation from some reference point. EN: Af has a second job worth pocketing: completion. Afmaken is to finish a thing off. Afronden is to round it off. And the flattest sentence in the language: NL: Het is af. EN: It's done. Hold onto that, because it's about to collide with the next particle. EN: Second: op. Two faces. The first is literal - up. Opstaan, to stand up. Opkijken, to look up. And when a plane leaves the ground, Dutch doesn't say off at all: NL: Het vliegtuig stijgt op. EN: The plane rises up - opstijgen. Same with a car pulling away from a light, gathering speed out of nothing: optrekken, pulling itself up to speed. English says the plane takes off and the car takes off; Dutch looks at both and sees upward. EN: The second face is the good one: consumed to empty. Eat it up, opeten. Drink it up, opdrinken. Use it all up, opmaken - your money, your credit, your patience. And on its own, op just means all gone. NL: De melk is op. EN: The milk is finished. There is none left. EN: Which sets up the collision. Af and op both come out as finish in English, and this is exactly where learners blur them. Op finishes by consuming something to empty - the thing disappears. Af finishes by completing a task - nothing is consumed, a job is simply done. So: NL: De ribbetjes zijn op. Het rapport is af. EN: The ribs are gone; the report is finished. English polishes off both of them. Dutch asks one question - did you use something up, or did you bring a job to done - and the answer picks the particle for you. EN: Third: weg. Away, in the sense of gone. Departed, receded into absence, not here any more. Remember the bird from the top of the episode. It isn't coming off anything and it isn't going up, so: NL: De vogel vliegt weg. EN: Wegvliegen. The car drives off, wegrijden. You throw something away, weggooien. You leave, weggaan - you become gone. Weg is pure absence by departure. EN: And it does something quiet and rather lovely in the figurative register. Wegspoelen is to wash away. Wegslikken is to swallow something back down - tears, usually. Weglachen is to laugh a thing off. In every one, weg sends a feeling into gone-ness the same way it sends the bird into the distance. EN: All three in one sentence, then. The most Gen-X evening imaginable: NL: Ik drink mijn herinneringen weg door de klus af te maken en dit biertje op te drinken. NL: Ik drink mijn herinneringen weg door de klus af te maken en dit biertje op te drinken. EN: I'll drink my memories away by finishing the job and polishing off this beer. The memories go weg - away, gone. The job goes af - brought to done. The beer goes op - consumed to empty. Away, done, empty. Three vectors that English would smear together as off and up and away. And watch what happens to the separable verbs in the te form: af te maken, op te drinken. The te slides in between the particle and the verb, and the particle stays put. EN: Today's Brueghel proverb, which is almost nothing but particles pointing at each other. NL: Van de os op de ezel springen. NL: Van de os op de ezel springen. EN: Literally: to jump from the ox onto the donkey. In the painting it means to come down in the world - you had an ox, now you have a donkey. In modern Dutch it more often means to skip from one subject to another, mid-conversation. Either way, look at the geometry: van marks the reference point you're leaving, op marks where you land. Six words, two vectors. Example: NL: Sorry, ik spring van de os op de ezel. EN: Sorry, I'm jumping from one thing to another. EN: That's episode ten. NL: Tot de volgende keer!