Word
De cafés hebben veel tafels.
Meaning
The cafés have many tables.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Lesson
Breakdown of De cafés hebben veel tafels.
hebben
to have
veel
much / many / a lot of
de tafel
the table
het café
the cafe
Questions & Answers about De cafés hebben veel tafels.
Why does tafels get an -s for the plural instead of -en?
Most Dutch nouns get -en in the plural, but words ending in unaccented syllables like -el, -em, -en, and -er usually take an -s. Because tafel ends in -el, its plural is tafels.
Why is the plural cafés written without an apostrophe?
Dutch words ending in a single open vowel usually get an apostrophe-s (like foto's) to keep the vowel sound long. But because the é in café already has an accent mark telling us how to pronounce it, there is no confusion. We just attach the -s directly.
I thought it was het café. Why does the sentence say De cafés?
You are right that the singular is het café. However, in Dutch, every plural noun always gets the article de, no matter what article it uses in the singular.
Does the word veel change when used with plural words like tafels?
No, veel stays exactly the same. In Dutch, veel translates to both "much" and "many". You use the exact same word for countable plural things like tables and uncountable things like water.