Die verdagte bly onbekend.

Here bly means remain or stay.

So Die verdagte bly onbekend means that the suspect continues to be unknown.

Be careful: bly can also be an adjective meaning glad/happy in sentences like Ek is bly. In your sentence, though, it is clearly a verb.

Verdagte is a noun here, meaning suspect.

It is related to verdag, which means suspicious. Afrikaans often forms nouns that are closely related to adjectives, and verdagte is the standard word for suspect in a legal or police context.

In this sentence:

• die verdagte = the suspect

The plural is:

• die verdagtes = the suspects

Because onbekend comes after the verb and is being used as a predicate adjective.

In Afrikaans, adjectives usually do not take -e when they come after verbs like is, bly, word, or lyk.

So:

• Die verdagte bly onbekend. = The suspect remains unknown.

But before a noun, you often do get -e:

• die onbekende verdagte = the unknown suspect

So the difference is:

• onbekende before a noun
• onbekend after a linking verb

No, this is a very normal Afrikaans main clause.

The structure is:

• Die verdagte = subject
• bly = finite verb
• onbekend = complement

So the sentence follows the common Afrikaans pattern of subject + verb + rest in a simple statement.

It is quite close to English word order here.

There is a small difference in meaning.

• is onbekend simply states that the suspect is unknown
• bly onbekend emphasizes that the suspect continues to be unknown

So bly adds the idea of an ongoing situation. It often suggests that people have tried to identify the suspect, but that still has not happened.

Die means the.

One nice thing about Afrikaans is that die does not change for gender. Afrikaans does not have the kind of masculine/feminine/neuter article system that some other languages do.

So:

• die man = the man
• die vrou = the woman
• die kind = the child

It is also used for plural nouns:

• die verdagtes = the suspects

Yes.

• on- = a negative prefix, like English un-
• bekend = known or well-known

So onbekend literally means unknown.

This is useful because the prefix on- appears in many Afrikaans words:

• onmoontlik = impossible
• onwaar = false / untrue
• onduidelik = unclear

Not exactly, but it is acting as a linking verb.

A linking verb connects the subject to a description or state. In this sentence, bly links die verdagte with onbekend.

Afrikaans uses several linking verbs, for example:

• is = is
• bly = remains
• word = becomes / is being
• lyk = seems

So bly is not the same as is, but it works in a similar grammatical way.

A rough English-friendly guide is:

• Die ≈ dee
• verdagte ≈ fur-DAKH-tuh
• bly ≈ blay
• onbekend ≈ on-buh-KENT

So the whole sentence is roughly:

dee fur-DAKH-tuh blay on-buh-KENT

The g sound in verdagte is the guttural Afrikaans sound, not a hard English g.

In most contexts, die verdagte will naturally be understood as the suspect.

Depending on context, verdagte can also be understood more literally as the suspicious one/person, but in real-life usage, especially in news, police, or legal language, the suspect is the normal interpretation.