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- Topic: Dutch >
- "Ik lees een heel boek."
23 Comments
277
Correct. The English word 'wake' could mean 'to stop sleeping' or 'the trail left in the water by a ship'. It's not entirely strange for a word in another language to be polysemous.
262
Fun fact: "heel" and "whole" are cognates. When you take into account that Dutch uses adjectives as adverbs, you get something like "whole" vs "wholly". And it is easy to see how a word like "wholly" would have its meaning diluted a bit until it starts getting used as a general intensifier - see the word "full", which was used as an adverb meaning "very" in archaic/old timey English, as in "full well".
175
Weird how something like "full well" has become the slang of adolescents in Germany, meaning "very well": "voll gut" - but it may be "out" already.
175
It is also a cognate of German "heil" and derived/related words such as "heilen", "Heiler". For instance: "Ist das Spielzeug noch heil?" ("is the toy still intact/not yet broken into pieces?"), in the sense of "complete", "whole".
17
Why is "een heel boek" instead of "een hele boek"? Is it thanks to 'het boek'? When it comes to 'het boek', 'heel' should be used.
277
Progressive tense in English could be expressed in a variety of ways in Dutch. Your way is more appropriate if you want to emphaisize on the continuity of the action. Please try not to make one-to-one mappings with grammatical concepts across different languages; it simply doesn't work. On the 'een heel boek' part, you would place it right after 'ben' - 'ik ben een heel boek aan het lezen'.