Questions & Answers about De waarheid is dat er nog documenten ontbreken.
In Dutch, er often functions as an expletive pronoun (a placeholder) to indicate existence, much like English “there” in “there are.” When you want to express that something exists (or is missing) in an indefinite amount, you place er before the verb and the subject:
Er ontbreken nog documenten = “There are still documents missing.”
Ontbreken means “to be missing” or “to lack.” It is an intransitive verb, so you don’t attach a direct object in the normal way. Instead, you typically combine it with er to talk about things that are missing:
- Er ontbreekt een pagina (“A page is missing”)
- Er ontbreken nog documenten (“There are still documents missing”)
Because the sentence is split into a main clause and a subordinate clause introduced by dat. Dutch subordinate clauses follow Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) order, so the finite verb (ontbreken) moves to the final position:
De waarheid is dat er nog documenten ontbreken.