Breakdown of De brandweerlui hebben de baby's gered.
hebben
to have
de baby
the baby
redden
to save (rescue)
de brandweerman
the firefighter
Questions & Answers about De brandweerlui hebben de baby's gered.
Why is the plural brandweerlui used here instead of brandweermannen?
For professions ending in -man, Dutch often replaces it with -lui or -lieden in the plural to refer to a collective group. While brandweermannen is grammatically correct and means "firemen" individually, brandweerlui is the natural, everyday way to say "firefighters" as a whole.
What is the difference between brandweerlui and brandweerlieden?
Both mean "firefighters", but -lui is generally more informal and frequently used in spoken Dutch. The suffix -lieden is slightly more formal and is often preferred in written news reports or official contexts.
Why does baby's get an apostrophe-s instead of just adding an s?
Because baby ends in a 'y' (which functions as a long vowel here). If you just added an 's' to make babys, Dutch pronunciation rules would make the 'y' sound like a short vowel. The apostrophe preserves the long vowel sound. This is a standard rule for nouns ending in a, i, o, u, and y.
Why does the past participle gered end in a single 'd' when the infinitive is redden?
To form the past participle, you take the verb stem red and add ge- to the front. Because the final letter of the stem ('d') is a voiced consonant not in the 't kofschip memory aid, you add a 'd' to the end. However, Dutch spelling rules dictate that native words never end in a double identical consonant, so geredd is simply written as gered.
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