As an expat in the Netherlands you constantly have to battle with getting the definite articles "het" (neuter) and "de" (masculine, feminine and plural) right. They are easily the Scylla and Charybdis of the Dutch language and just like our definite articles in Swedish ("den" and "det") there is no good rule to help you know when to use which.
During my Dutch course at Vrije Universiteit I got thought the rule that if in doubt use "de" since it is the most frequently used of the two.
I recently wrote a presentation in Dutch and I really wanted to get the Dutch text on the slides correct. I thought that selecting the user "Check Grammar" in the Mac OS X Spell checker would help me but unfortunately is seemed to do very little.
So I did a little test to see if the check box had any effect on the following sentences:
Dutch
De paard loopt snel. (wrong)
Het paard loopt snel. (correct)
English
The horse fast runs. (wrong)
The horse runs fast. (correct)
Swedish
Hästen fort springer. (wrong)
Hästen springer fort. (correct)
According to the spell checker all of the above sentences are correct. I have no clue what is meant by "Check Grammar" according to Apple but it certainly does not involve word order or articles. Thanks be to the almighty for online dictionaries and Wordfinder.
And shame on the UI team at apple who put the checkbox there without checking if the programmers actually had implemented the underlying functionality.
... of course Microsoft Word would be the other extreme warning about old fashioned sentence constructions left and right as soon as there is a deviation from the subject verb object word order.
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