# Ik lees, hij...?



## vermillionxtears

Hoi!

I'm a fairly new learner of Dutch.
I've just begun to learn it, and might I say, I could be in love with it. It's a wonderful accompaniment to German. 

I have a small question. I've read that if you have a verb whose root ends in _z_ or _v_, the first person conjugation changes to _s_ or _f_ respectively.
Therefore, when conjugating _lezen_ into the first person, it becomes:
_ik lees_

Does this also happen in the second and third person?
Does it stay _je/ hij/ zij leezt_ or does it change to _leest_?

Bij voorbaat dank voor de hulp!


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## Frank06

Hi,


vermillionxtears said:


> I have a small question. I've read that if you have a verb whose root ends in _z_ or _v_, the first person conjugation changes to _s_ or _f_ respectively.[...]
> Does this also happen in the second and third person?
> Does it stay _je/ hij/ zij leezt_ or does it change to _leest_?


Yes, it's "je lee*st* / zij lee*st*" etc.

As for a verb like _graven_, to dig, it would be:
ik graaf
jij graaft
zij graaft
wij graven

Good luck with learning Dutch!!

Groetjes,

Frank


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## vermillionxtears

> Yes, it's "je lee*st* / zij lee*st*" etc.
> 
> As for a verb like _graven_, to dig, it would be:
> ik graaf
> jij graaft
> zij graaft
> wij graven



Ik versta, dank jij wel!
But now that you mention it, does the pronunciation on "ik graaf" change due to the doubling of the a?


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## elroy

vermillionxtears said:


> But now that you mention it, does the pronunciation on "ik graaf" change due to the doubling of the a?


 No, it does not.


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## Grytolle

You may never write "z" or "v" at the end of a syllable. I have no idea why they treat those two letters in another way than other consonants that can lose stem - but I'd be very glad to find out because atm it just feels stupid to me 

(btw hi, i'm johan!)


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## vermillionxtears

> No, it does not.



And now I understand why, thanks to study of the Dutch spelling rules. _graven_ is already pronounced with a long a, since the syllables are separated as such:
_gra-ven_
Because the _a_ in the word ends the syllable, it immediately becomes long. Very nice to know. 



> You may never write "z" or "v" at the end of a syllable. I have no idea why they treat those two letters in another way than other consonants that can lose stem - but I'd be very glad to find out because atm it just feels stupid to me


Goededag Johan!
I really don't know either, but I personally think it makes Dutch more elegant. Call me crazy, but I just don't see "graav" as being as nice-looking as "graaf." 
Perhaps it has something to do with the old forms of their language. When I studied French (gladly, I've stopped), I read that some elements of old French were retained in modern French, even if they don't really make any sense. (For instance, the character _ê_ has no separate pronounciation in French, but was used in Old French to show that an _s_ was going to follow.) Maybe the same goes for this.
Either way, it's something that isn't too difficult to follow, imo. :3


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## MallePietje

Grytolle said:


> You may never write "z" or "v" at the end of a syllable. I have no idea why they treat those two letters in another way than other consonants that can lose stem - but I'd be very glad to find out because atm it just feels stupid to me
> 
> (btw hi, i'm johan!)



It's because the 'z' and 'v' are "hard of sound" and therefore more difficult to pronounce at the end of a word than the 's' and 'f' and because 's' and 'f' are more softer of sound, they give a more elegant touch.


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## Frank06

Hi,



MallePietje said:


> It's because the 'z' and 'v' are "hard of sound" and therefore more difficult to pronounce at the end of a word than the 's' and 'f' and because 's' and 'f' are more softer of sound, they give a more elegant touch.


More difficult to pronounce? I never heard a speaker of English say that 'was' /z/ would be more difficult than */s/. 
Idem dito for a speaker of Persian, to name just one of the many other languages which do have voiced (rather than 'hard') consonants in word final position.
And your appreciation of the sounds (softer, more elegant) strike me as subjective, rather than explicative.

By the way, the letters <z> and <v> only sound the way we agree they should sound. The evolution of voiced word final consonants to voiceless word final consonants, which is not limited to Dutch, by the way, has little or nothing to do with the way we spell.  Sounds are not letters are not sounds.
Nobody seems to have a problem with letter <d> and <b> representing the sounds [t] and [p] in word final position. Theoretically, writing 'ik leez' for [le.s] (which is basicaly the same as hond [hont]) wouldn't matter, as long as we'd agree that <z> at the end of a word sounds like [s], which we did, m.m. for hond [hont] and heb [hep].

Groetjes,

Frank


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## FlorisEnsink

My 4 year old cousin writes 'ik hep' instead of 'ik heb' and all Dutch (or Flemmish) children have issues with the conjugation of verbs of which the root ends with a 'd' (hij wordt). 
Voiced consonnants at the end of a word are never pronounced with that voice in Dutch, so 'd' becomes 't', 'b' is 'p', 'z' is s and 'v' is 'f'.
Why the spelling does change for 'v' and 'z' and not for 'f' and 's' I would not know.


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## Frank06

Hi,



Grytolle said:


> You may never write "z" or "v" at the end of a syllable. I have no idea why they treat those two letters in another way than other consonants that can lose stem - but I'd be very glad to find out because at this moment it just feels stupid to me



It's quite illogical indeed. 

I also think that IF Dutch writers at a certain point would have used 'ik leez' en 'ik graav', and IF this would have been the contemporary standard rule, we would be now raising our eyebrows when reading 'ik lees'/'ik graaf', in exactly the same way we do when reading words as 'Reynaert' (also Reynaerd, Reynaerde); 'hont' (also hond, honden) in medieval texts. 
We probably would call "ik lees" sms-style, chat-board-lingo, the result of a failing spelling education (sorry, make that education in general), proof that the youth and the country and the western world, this whole planet and the universe is in decline.
And I could even imagine people writing things as "(word final -z and -v) give a more elegant touch" and "it makes Dutch more elegant" on message boards  (sorry, guys, I couldn't leave it). 

Yes, it's quite illogical indeed.

Every year I have to explain the ''tkofschip' (or fokschaap_sh_it, keeping in mind the amount of "English" verbs into Dutch, such as _pushen_), and every year I get the same reactions from my students when dealing with 'verhui*s*de/verhuisd', a big biiig sigh and comments which boils down to something as 'You guys are crazy' and 'how can you expect us to learn this'.

Yesterday I found the book "_Waarom die lettertjes in de soep_. _Inzicht in spelling_" (2008) by Guy Tops, and I hoped to find more information on this issue, I mean on the why-question. 
The only thing he says about it is:


> Ik denk - ik weet het niet zeker - ik denk dus dat ik weet hoe dat zo gekomen is. Herinner u dat we onze spelling eigenlijk uit de Latijnse traditie hebben. In het Latijn eindigen woorden nooit op -z, maar wel op -d.
> *My translation:*
> I think - sic, I don't know for sure - so I think I know why. Remember that our spelling comes from the Latin tradition. Latin words never end in -z, but they do in -d. [Please keep in mind he's talking about _spelling_.]


But alas, he doesn't elaborate on this.

Groetjes,

Frank

PS I don't really want to plug this book, but...
It _is_ quite informative, even though it is written in a typical "for dummies" style: addressing the reader, a really silly "joke" every 10 lines. Since he was my first linguistics professor, this results in me "hearing" his quite, erm, peculiar voice while reading the silly jokes, some of which I remember from his lectures, and the book as a whole). If you can make an abstraction of this, _and_ of the fact that he uses both a hatchet and a scalpel to disect the Dutch spelling rules (he wants to popularise and give rather specialist information at the same time), you may find it a very informative and sometimes even thought provoking book.


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## Lieven

vermillionxtears said:


> And now I understand why, thanks to study of the Dutch spelling rules. _graven_ is already pronounced with a long a, since the syllables are separated as such:
> _gra-ven_
> Because the _a_ in the word ends the syllable, it immediately becomes long. Very nice to know.
> 
> 
> Goededag Johan!
> I really don't know either, but I personally think it makes Dutch more elegant. Call me crazy, but I just don't see "graav" as being as nice-looking as "graaf."
> Perhaps it has something to do with the old forms of their language. When I studied French (gladly, I've stopped), I read that some elements of old French were retained in modern French, even if they don't really make any sense. (For instance, the character _ê_ has no separate pronounciation in French, but was used in Old French to show that an _s_ was going to follow.) Maybe the same goes for this.
> Either way, it's something that isn't too difficult to follow, imo. :3



Yea French is pretty crazy, but don't forget that there's only one language who's spelling is more detached from it's pronunciation, and that is English itself.

As someone who thinks that spelling should always match pronunciation as closely as possible, I think it's great that we use s and f instead of z and v at the ends of words, and I really think we should actually do the same thing to d's and b's at the end of a word.


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## Grytolle

What about if one would prononce the letter like z due to a following vowel or so?


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## Lieven

Grytolle said:


> What about if one would prononce the letter like z due to a following vowel or so?



We don't do that in Dutch, if the next word starts with a vowel, the hard sound at the end of the previous word stays hard.


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## Grytolle

Lieven said:


> We don't do that in Dutch.


It's done. Before a b then.


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## Lieven

Grytolle said:


> It's done. Before a b then.



I just tried it out, and I think you are right. I think that if we would try to speak "formally slow", we would still devoice it, but if I just talk at a normal pace, the b does indeed have some voice

heb ik <-- here the b is indeed voiced
wip ik <-- here the p stays hard, because the infinitive is wippen

With a final d, it seems to work in the same way, but it doesn't seem to happen to final s'es and f's

Pretty interesting actually, never realized this.


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## Grytolle

Lieven said:


> I just tried it out, and I think you are right. I think that if we would try to speak "formally slow", we would still devoice it, but if I just talk at a normal pace, the b does indeed have some voice
> 
> heb ik <-- here the b is indeed voiced
> wip ik <-- here the p stays hard, because the infinitive is wippen
> 
> With a final d, it seems to work in the same way, but it doesn't seem to happen to final s'es and f's
> 
> Pretty interesting actually, never realized this.


If you are the Lieven I think, you could try with something like "nog een" too ^^


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## Frank06

Hi,


Lieven said:


> With a final d, it seems to work in the same way, but it doesn't seem to happen to final s'es and f's


Pas op! /pazop/
Morgen graaf ik een put / gra.vək/

Groetjes,

Frank


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