Parts of the speech
Today I wanted to write a post about pronouns and corresponding personal adjectives, to tidy up my grammar a little. When I was still taking courses, I was extremely careful to the grammar rules as I was trying to speak Dutch. But now I notice that these rules are slowly vanishing with time, and in a way with speaking more Dutch since sometimes I think less, to speak more fluently and following the rule of “it sounds ok”.
At the same time, I do not think that speaking the language excludes the grammar, or the other way around. Furthermore, I like going through books, my old notes and websites (especially now that I can access also the Dutch ones), thus I’ve decided to go through the grammar, using also new sources, to give it a structure that I find logical.

What happens though is that when I start collecting ideas, for any new one I see so many missing pieces that I need to shift. That’s what happened today: I was trying to understand fully pronouns and adjectives before writing the post, and I ended up looking at the parts of the speech. You know, these that you study at elementary school (name, pronoun, verb etc.) and that have all these acronyms written in vocabularies?
Well, it is already some time that seeing acronyms I do not fully understand annoys me. So here below you’ll find a list of the translations and acronyms (as used in my own vocabulary)
Dutch | Dutch abbreviation | English |
---|---|---|
lidwoord | LIDW | article |
zelfstandig naamwoord substantief |
ZN | substantive |
voornaamwoord – persoonlijk – aanwijzend – betrekkelijk – wederkerende – wederkerige – bezittelijk – vragend – onbepaald |
VNW | pronoun – personal – demonstrative – relative – reflexive – reciprocal – possessive – interrogative – indefinite |
bijvoeglijk naamwoord adjectief |
BN | adjective |
werkwoord | WW | verb |
bijwoord | BW | adverb |
voorzetsel | VZ | preposition |
voegwoord koppelwoord |
VGW | conjunction |
tussenwerpsel | TW | interjection |
I am going to learn them by heart, so that I don’t need to look for them every time – or just keep a print of this table at hand. Then I’ll try to go through all of these sections in details…up to now I’ve written a post on the article. Next ones will follow.
Stay tuned, and enjoy!
Doei!
Marta