Breakdown of Deze overtuiging wordt door veel mensen gedeeld.
veel
much / many / a lot of
deze
this / these
de mens
the human / the person
worden
to become
delen
to share
door
by (agent in a passive sentence)
de overtuiging
the conviction/the belief
Questions & Answers about Deze overtuiging wordt door veel mensen gedeeld.
How can I tell that overtuiging needs deze instead of dit?
Overtuiging ends in the suffix -ing. In Dutch, nouns derived from verbs that end in -ing (like overtuigen becoming overtuiging) are almost always de-words. Because it is a de-word, we point to it using deze (this) rather than dit.
The English translation says "is shared", so why does the Dutch sentence use wordt instead of is?
This sentence is in the passive voice. To form the present passive (when an action happens to the subject), Dutch uses worden plus the past participle, whereas English uses "to be". So wordt gedeeld means "is shared". If you used is gedeeld, it would mean the sharing was an action already completed in the past ("has been shared").
Why is the preposition door used here?
In passive sentences, the preposition door is used to indicate who or what is performing the action. So while door usually means "through", here door veel mensen translates to "by many people".
Why does the verb gedeeld go at the very end of the sentence?
Dutch uses a split verb structure in main clauses. The conjugated helping verb (wordt) takes the second position in the sentence, and the past participle (gedeeld) is pushed all the way to the end, wrapping around the rest of the information.
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