Learn Dutch: Had jij de geüpdatete bestanden al gemaild? - Had you already emailed the updated files?

Had jij de geüpdatete bestanden al gemaild?

Had you already emailed the updated files?

Breakdown of Had jij de geüpdatete bestanden al gemaild?

Questions & Answers about Had jij de geüpdatete bestanden al gemaild?

Why is there a trema (the two dots) in geüpdatete instead of a hyphen?

When we add the Dutch prefix ge- to an English loanword that starts with a vowel, we use a trema if the vowel combination could be misread. Here, ge plus u could be mistakenly read as the Dutch eu sound, so we write geüpdatete to keep the syllables separate.

How exactly is the word geüpdatete built? It looks like it has a lot of letters at the end!

Let's break it down! The verb is updaten and its stem is update. For English loanwords ending in a silent 'e', we look at the last pronounced sound to determine the ending. The 't' sound means it takes a -t for the past participle, giving us geüpdatet. Finally, because it acts as an adjective before the noun bestanden, we add the standard adjectival -e, resulting in geüpdatete.

Why does the past participle gemaild end in a -d rather than a -t?

English loanwords follow the standard Dutch 't kofschip rule based on how they are pronounced. The stem of mailen is mail. Since the final sound is an 'l' (which is a voiced consonant not in the 't kofschip list), the past participle takes a -d to become gemaild.

Is updaten a separable verb in Dutch? Why isn't it ?