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Questions & Answers about Om middernacht gaat het alarm af.
Why do we use om here instead of another time preposition?
Om is the specific preposition used in Dutch for exact clock times, such as om drie uur (at three o'clock) or om middernacht (at midnight). By contrast, you use op for days (op vrijdag) and in for months or seasons (in de zomer).
Since this lesson is about over, binnen, and in, could I say over middernacht?
No, you wouldn't use over here. In a temporal sense, over is used with a duration to mean an amount of time from now (e.g., over een uur means "in an hour"). Because middernacht is a fixed point on the clock and not a duration, over doesn't work. If you wanted to say "after midnight," you would use na middernacht.
Why is the word order gaat het alarm instead of het alarm gaat?
Because the sentence starts with the time phrase om middernacht, it triggers inversion. The verb (gaat) must stay in the second grammatical position, so the subject (het alarm) swaps places to come immediately after it. If you started with the subject, it would be normal word order: Het alarm gaat om middernacht af.
What is the full verb in this sentence, and why is af at the end?