Breakdown of De opa's drinken koffie en de baby's slapen.
en
and
drinken
to drink
slapen
to sleep
de koffie
the coffee
Questions & Answers about De opa's drinken koffie en de baby's slapen.
Why do we write opa's with an apostrophe instead of just adding an 's'?
If a Dutch noun ends in a single vowel (a, i, o, u, or y), you add an apostrophe before the plural -s. This is to keep the vowel sound long. If you just wrote opas, the rules of Dutch pronunciation would make the 'a' short, rather than the long 'aa' sound in opa.
Wait, the English plural is 'babies'. Why does Dutch use baby's?
Dutch doesn't change a final 'y' to 'ies' for plurals. Because 'y' acts like an open vowel at the end of a word, it simply follows the exact same apostrophe rule as opa's.
The translation says 'are drinking' and 'are sleeping'. Why are there no words for 'are' in the Dutch sentence?
Dutch rarely uses a direct translation for the English 'to be doing something' (the present continuous tense). The simple present verbs drinken and slapen translate to both 'drink/sleep' and 'are drinking/are sleeping' depending on the context.
Why isn't there an article like de or het before koffie?
Koffie is an uncountable noun. Just like in English, when you are talking about an uncountable noun in general (they are drinking coffee, not 'the' coffee), you can just leave the article out.