Characteristics of the Dutch Language in AX Semantics
Fundamentals
In Dutch, you need to know the gender of a noun to form (together with number and case) the accompanying adjectives, determiners, numerals, and pronouns correctly.
Dutch has three genders for nouns: masculine, feminine, and neuter. There are two numbers: singular and plural. Additionally, Dutch only has nominative case for nouns, but includes accusative and dative case for personal pronouns.
| grammatical name | values | examples |
|---|---|---|
| gender | masculine | de oude hond (the old dog) |
| feminine | de oude vrouw (the old woman) | |
| neuter | het oude huis (the old house) | |
| number | singular | groot huis (big house) |
| plural | grote huizen (big houses) | |
| cases (noun) | nominative | vrouw (woman) |
| cases (pronoun) | accusative | Ik heb hen gisteren gezien. (I've seen them yesterday.) |
| dative | Hij heeft hun verraden. (He has betrayed them.) | |
| adjectives (noun) | before noun | rode appel (red apple) |
| verb tenses | present | hij gaat (he goes) |
| past | hij ging (he went) |
The standard order of a noun phrase in Dutch is the following: preposition + determiner + numeral + adjective + noun.
See for example:
over deze drie populaire boeken
about these three popular books[pl]
PREP DET NUM ADJ NOUN
"about these three popular books"
Lexicon
Nouns
For Dutch nouns, the LEXICON needs to encode gender and determiner and preposition changes. The number x case forms of a noun should be added to the lexicon if they are not regular.
If a lexicon entry is missing, determiners, adjectives, numerals, and pronouns, which would need lexical information to inflect, are omitted.
Examples
The basic lexicon entry for huis (house) contains:
- gender: neuter
- inflection table for case and number:
| Singular | Plural | |
|---|---|---|
| Nominative | huis | huizen |
note
If you need lexicon entries for countries, write to the support about that and you will get them for Dutch with automatic handling of prepositions.
Adjectives
In the lexicon, the inflection table for gender, case, and number can be encoded. For adjective position, the default is "before noun";.
Verbs
The most common verbs are encoded in our software. If a verb inflects the wrong way, you should add it to the lexicon.
Container settings
Determiners
The AX NLG platform supports the following determiners for Dutch: definite, indefinite, demonstrative, relative, possessive, and quantifier (every).
Numerals
The noun will automatically agree with the numeral number when a numeral variable is used. Four types of numerals are possible on the AX NLG platform: cardinal, cardinal as digit, ordinal, and ordinal as digit.
| cardinal | ordinal | |
|---|---|---|
| text | negen dagen (nine days) | de negende dag (the ninth day) |
| digit | 9 dagen (9 days) | de 9e dag (the 9th day) |
For Dutch, ordinal numerals are written out until 30, otherwise (above 30) the output is in digit form. Cardinal numerals are written out until 12, otherwise (above 12) the output is in digit form. Take cardinal numerals for example:
twaalf auto's
(twelve cars)
13 auto's
(13 cars)
Determiner switch
If you set the determiner switch for a specific noun in the LEXICON, it will automatically switch to another determiner when you add the determiner to the container. In the following second example, the container automatically switch definite determiner de for Seychellen because it is configured in the LEXICON.
Ze wonen in Duitsland. <no determiner>
(They live in Germany.)
Ze wonen op de Seychellen. <switch to definite determiner>
(They live in the Seychelles.)
Defaults: In Dutch, the majority of countries are not accompanied by a definite determiner. In that case, it is assumed that without an article is the default.
note
Currently, if the lexicon entry of a country includes a switch from none to definite, there is no way to use the country without the article (e.g. just "Seychellen"). Please write to the support, if you have a use case where you need both cases in a project.
Preposition switch
On the AX NLG platform, the settings for the container Duitsland (Germany) are: preposition="in" and case="nom".
in Duitsland
(in Germany)
For the below sentence with a different place (i.e. Sylt), the platform settings are the same as above (preposition="in", case="nom"), but the lexical information changes the preposition and shows a switch from in to op:
op Sylt
(on Sylt)
Language Variants
The AX NLG platform offers 2 variants of the Dutch language:
- Netherlands
- Belgium
The differences between these variants are mostly lexical.