Breakdown of 's Nachts wordt er niet gepresenteerd.
niet
not
worden
to become
er
there (existential)
's nachts
at night
presenteren
to present
Questions & Answers about 's Nachts wordt er niet gepresenteerd.
Why does the Dutch sentence use wordt er ... gepresenteerd to mean "people do not present"?
This is the impersonal passive voice. Dutch uses worden (to be) plus er (there) and a past participle to describe an action happening without mentioning who is doing it. It translates literally to "there is not presented", which is how Dutch naturally expresses "people don't present" or "no presenting happens".
What is the subject of this sentence?
The word er acts as a "dummy subject" here. Because the passive voice removes the actual people doing the presenting, the sentence still needs a grammatical subject to be complete. Dutch uses er for this purpose when there isn't a specific object being acted upon.
Why is the verb wordt placed before the subject er?
Why does 's Nachts have an apostrophe and a lowercase 's' at the beginning?
The 's is a short form of an old Dutch word des (meaning "of the"). So 's nachts originally meant "of the night". When a sentence starts with this little 's, it stays lowercase, and the first letter of the main word (Nachts) gets capitalized instead!
Why does the past participle gepresenteerd end in a -d instead of a -t?
You can figure this out using the 't kofschip rule. If you take the infinitive presenteren and remove the -en, you get the stem presenteer. The last letter is r, which is not a consonant in the word 't kofschip. Therefore, the past participle gets a -d at the end.
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