Breakdown of Er zou hier een ruimteschip zijn neergestort.
zijn
to be
een
a/an
hier
here
zullen
shall / will
er
there (existential)
het ruimteschip
the spaceship
neerstorten
to crash (aircraft, fall down)
Questions & Answers about Er zou hier een ruimteschip zijn neergestort.
Why is zou translated as "is said to" instead of "would"?
In this lesson on evidential modality, you are seeing how zouden expresses hearsay or unconfirmed reports. While zou often means "would" for hypotheticals, here it indicates a rumor or claim. It translates well to "It is said that..." or "Supposedly...". This is extremely common in Dutch journalism and storytelling.
How do zou, zijn, and neergestort work together grammatically?
This sentence uses a modal verb with a perfect infinitive. Zou is the conjugated modal verb. To show that the rumored event already happened in the past ("to have crashed"), we use the perfect infinitive: the auxiliary verb zijn plus the past participle neergestort.
Why is the auxiliary verb zijn used instead of hebben?
The verb neerstorten (to crash or plummet down) describes a change of location or state. In Dutch, verbs indicating a change of state or directional motion take zijn as their helping verb in perfect tenses, rather than hebben.
Why start with Er rather than just saying Een ruimteschip zou hier zijn neergestort?
When a sentence has an indefinite subject (introduced by een, meaning "a spaceship" instead of "the spaceship"), Dutch strongly prefers a construction using Er as a dummy subject at the start. The real subject (een ruimteschip) then moves to the middle of the sentence.
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