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- Topic: Dutch >
- "Één kind is genoeg."
35 Comments
Not usually. "Replacement population" is much more of a reality in populated countries. That means 1 couple - 2 (surviving) children. If that was constant across the world, then the population would remain exactly the same. Underdeveloped countries tend to have more children per couple due to things like high infant mortality, sexism/patriarchy, etc.
Yeah! I guess Duo is trying to reduce an owercrowded society)) such an agressive policy from a friendly bird!
if every woman gave birth to one kid, then the population will rapidly decline about 51% every 100 years, but if they give birth two kids then the population will stagnate.
The one-child-only law just changed in China - Duolingo making a political statement? ;-)
Shouldn't this be written as Eén? A strange little thing I seem to remember seeing.
Mid-sentence it is of course één.
According to this website you are right. If "één" is at the start of the sentence the capitalised e loses its accent. Though personally I think it's just a minor technicality.
That is not true in French at least. Accents should be used on uppercases in French, but many French persons wrongly think that they are not needed. It comes from the days of typewriters when typing uppercases with accents was difficult. There is no excuse with computers nowadays to omit uppercase. Accentuated uppercases are recommended by L'Académie française: http://www.academie-francaise.fr/questions-de-langue#5_strong-em-accentuation-des-majuscules-em-strong
I can't tell whether it's the same for Dutch though.
The accents in Dutch are optional, it just indicates you how to pronounce it. You don't pronounce "één" and "een" the same. I am Belgian and that's what my Dutch teachers always told me. And you're right; many French-speakers think that accentuated uppercases are not needed but they're wrong. That's not a big mistake though ;)
Regardless of what L'academie francaise declares is standard french (which is but one variety of French), there is a current in French society that dictates that capital letters don't get accents, and that line of thinking is reinforced by the media, which very frequently removes accents from the first word in a sentence. So, it's definitely a thing.
Usage of accentuated uppercases in French medias is certainly floating. It seems to be a tie more or less. I randomly checked a few online news papers. Those use accentuated uppercases: lefigaro.fr, lepoint.fr, humanite.fr, lexpress.fr. Those don't: lemonde.fr, liberation.fr, leparisien.fr, latribune.fr. My opinion: accentuated uppercases are less ambiguous. Unicode is ubiquitous these days (no excuse here for sticking to Latin1 encoding). And you can't go wrong will following recommendation of L'Académie française.
Actually the Netherlands is the most densely populated country in Europe...
Actually, it's not. The most densely populated country in Europe is Monaco 18,713 /km2; the Netherlands is 5th with 407.44 /km2
Yes, after I wrote this, I did read about this fact, but dankjewel anyways :D
Is this always the rule? I'm Norwegian and we use the same difference between one and a/an, and you should always use the accent when you're talking about one. I asked my Dutch boyfriend about this and he said you don't really have to use the accents unless there might be confusion about wether it could be one or a. So when you count in Dutch you can use een as 1. Was wondering if anyone knew if this is true.
If it's clear it's a number you can use een, though één is always one. For clarity in the course the rule in Susande's post is used.
Why are there no uppercases at the beginning of a sentence anymore? Since the last update...
