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Re: Oooooo! I hates that varmint! Attn: Dutch speakers

From:Christophe Grandsire <christophe.grandsire@...>
Date:Wednesday, September 4, 2002, 6:00
En réponse à "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>:

> Oooooo! I hates when books do that! > > So I'm boning up on Dutch over the summer, and all three of the Teach > Yourself books I borrowed from the local library mention "gij". All > three say it's biblical, so don't worry about it (then *why* did you > bring it up in the first place?; I could've sat in blissful > ignorance, thank you very much).
Well, it's still used in some Flemish dialects, so they probably added it so that you can recognise it in case you'd go to the Belgian countryside, Flemish- speaking part ;))) . But one gave us "gij zijd", which
> looks like it may fall in the same spot on the paradigm as "ihr > seid". But that was it! So in the present tense do I plunk a "-t" on > the stem like "jij"; do I plunk an "-en" on like "jullie"; or is > there some wildly errant form I need to know about? And do other > tenses behave regularly (I assume they do)? >
Well, my experience is rather poor here, but from what I've heard on TV from Belgian speakers who used 'gij', they use it with the same verb forms as 'jij'. The form 'zijd' is probably extremely biblical ;))) . Although now that I think of it, since final voiced consonants are devoiced in Dutch, it could very well be that they write a '-d' instead of a '-t' with 'gij', but with regular verbs those wouldn't lead to different pronunciations anyway.
> Oooooooo! >
Don't worry too much about 'gij'. You won't be expected to use it, just to recognise it if it appears. Christophe. http://rainbow.conlang.free.fr Take your life as a movie: do not let anybody else play the leading role.

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Irina Rempt <irina@...>