Breakdown of In dezelfde hoek hangt een lamp aan het plafond.
Questions & Answers about In dezelfde hoek hangt een lamp aan het plafond.
Dutch allows you to front a prepositional phrase (here In dezelfde hoek) to set the scene or emphasize location. When you do this, you must invert the subject and the verb, so hangt (the verb) comes right after the phrase, followed by een lamp (the subject).
Dezelfde means the same. You use dezelfde with nouns that take the de-article (common gender), and hetzelfde with nouns that take the het-article (neuter gender). Because hoek (corner) is a de-word, it becomes dezelfde hoek.
In Dutch, objects that hang are said to hang aan something (literally “on” or “at”), not op (“on-top of”) or in (“inside”). So a lamp that’s suspended from the ceiling hangs aan het plafond.
Dutch uses hangen (to hang) for objects that dangle or are suspended, staan (to stand) for things that are upright on a surface, and liggen (to lie) for things that rest on or in a surface. A suspended lamp therefore hangt.
Een is the indefinite article (“a” or “an” in English). It indicates that we’re introducing a lamp into the conversation, not referring to a previously mentioned or specific lamp (which would require de).
Yes, you can say In de hoek hangt een lamp (“In the corner hangs a lamp”). Adding dezelfde (“the same”) signals that this is the same corner you talked about before—important if, for example, previous sentences described something else in that corner.
Yes. In Dutch main clauses, if you move something other than the subject to the front (like a time or place phrase), you must invert the subject and verb. So after In dezelfde hoek, hangt comes before een lamp. If you started with the subject (Een lamp hangt in dezelfde hoek), no inversion is needed.