Dutch is a nasty language even for the Dutch speakers. Allow me to explain a wee bit of Dutch grammar to illustrate this. Also, the question that I want to ask is if Dutch is even nastier for dyslectics. But I digress.
The first person singular of a verb is just the stem of that verb*. The second person singular is either the stem of the verb + t, or, when the sentence is a question, just the stem. The third person singular of a verb is the verb stem +t**
So what this boils down to is:
Ik fiets – I ride a bicycle
Jij fietst; fiets jij? - You (sg.) ride a bicycle; Do you ride a bicycle?
Hij fietst - He rides a bicycle.
So far so good, nothing goes wrong because everyone hears the ‘t’. But then there’s the verb stems ending in –d, such as houden, to hold. Here goes.
Ik houd - I hold
Jij houdt; houd jij? – You hold; do you hold?
Hij houdt – He holds
Thing is, a d at the end of a word becomes voiceless, like a t. As a result, houd sounds just like houdt. And as a result, people screw up writing these forms, which are common, all the time. I’d say this is the most commonly made mistake in writing in the Dutch language by native speakers.
This is made worse in verbs that have a prefix such as be-. These don’t get the prefix ‘ge-’ to indicate that it’s a past participle.
Consider, for instance, the verb begeleiden, to supervise:
Ik begeleid – I supervise
Jij begeleidt; begeleid jij – You supervise; do you supervise?
Hij begeleidt – he supervises
Ik heb begeleid – I have supervised.
In other cases, the verb stem is a noun in its own right. Consider:
het onderscheid - the distinction
ik onderscheid – I distinguish
jij onderscheidt; onderscheid jij – You distinguish; do you distinguish?
hij onderscheidt – he distinguishes
(and: het onderscheidt – it distinguishes)
Needless to say, although in and of itself this confusing but it is not insanely difficult; all you need to do is replace to verb ending in –d with a regular verb ending in something else, and listen to your mind’s voice telling you what’s right. Me, I use the verb ‘hakken’, to chop (wood), to dance to house music. Perfectly regular, no problems here.
However, many people have lots of problems getting this straight. I am the unfortunate position of having to correct undergrad students’ papers for a living, and I see these mistakes (which really a eight-year old should be able to identify and avoid) all the time. Did I mention that these are university students? Anyway, I usually point the error of their ways out them and they guffaw sheepishly. Sometimes, however, they play the ‘I’m dyslectic, I get out of spelling error jail for free’-card. Now I really hate to be badgering people about mistakes that they can’t help making but in this case I’m not sure they’re off the hook. After all, dyslexia is about not recognizing that you wrote ‘huose’ instead of ‘house’, ‘gip’ instead of ‘pig’, and ‘lysdexia’ instead of ‘dyslexia’, things like that. In this case, both ‘houd’ and ‘houdt’, ‘onderscheid’ and ‘onderscheidt’ are words, so the ‘word image’ which non-dyslectics can rely on to decide which is the right spelling fails us here – you really just need to think about it.
However, I don’t want to be a grammar nazi without the backing of the dope, so I’m reaching out to you. Given what you by now know about Dutch verbs (and which I implore you to forget asap), is this something that would be disproportionally hard for dyslectics to figure out or is this equally hard on everyone?
- except in… well, exceptional cases, such as the verbs to be and others.
** again, there’s exceptions