Word
De warmte heeft de aardbei ontdooid.
Meaning
The heat has thawed the strawberry.
Part of speech
sentence
Pronunciation
Course
Breakdown of De warmte heeft de aardbei ontdooid.
hebben
to have
de warmte
the warmth / the heat
de aardbei
the strawberry
ontdooien
to thaw
Questions & Answers about De warmte heeft de aardbei ontdooid.
Why do we use heeft here instead of is for a change of state?
In Dutch, verbs of state change like ontdooien (to thaw) take zijn when the change simply happens to the subject (intransitive), but they take hebben when the subject actively causes the change to a direct object (transitive). Here, de warmte (the heat) is actively performing the action on de aardbei (the direct object), so we use hebben (heeft).
How would I say 'The strawberry has thawed' if I don't mention the heat?
If you remove the cause (the heat) and just want to state that the strawberry underwent the change, the strawberry becomes the subject. Because there is no direct object anymore (making the verb intransitive), the auxiliary verb switches to zijn: De aardbei is ontdooid.
Why doesn't the past participle ontdooid get a ge- prefix?
Verbs that begin with an unstressed, inseparable prefix like ont-, be-, ver-, her-, or ge- do not get an extra ge- prefix in the perfect tense. The prefix ont- already does the job, so the past participle is simply ontdooid, not geontdooid.
Why does ontdooid end in a -d instead of a -t?