de of het corpus?
het corpus
collection of writings
noun · /ˈkɔr.pʏs/
It is “het corpus”. The plural is “de corpora”, and like every Dutch plural it takes “de”.
Pronunciation, example sentences and the rest of the entry: corpus
Forms
- Article
- het corpus
- Plural
- de corpora
- Diminutive
- het corpusje
- Also means
- text corpus
- How common
- in everyday Dutch
In a sentence
Het corpus van Vondel is indrukwekkend.
The corpus of Vondel is impressive.
Voor dit onderzoek gebruiken we een groot corpus.
For this research, we use a large corpus.
Ze werkt aan het samenstellen van een nieuw corpus.
She is working on compiling a new corpus.
Why this article
No rule predicts it
This one has to be memorised. No spelling pattern marks it as neuter, which is exactly why it is worth learning as “het corpus” rather than as “corpus” on its own.
The rules that do work
- • Every plural takes “de”, without exception.
- • Every diminutive ending in -je takes “het”, without exception.
- • Nouns ending in -ing, -heid, -tie, -teit or -schap take “de”.
- • Roughly two thirds of all nouns take “de”, so it is the better guess.
Other nouns whose article has to be memorised
Stop guessing de and het
Woordje has a practice mode for exactly this: it shows a noun and asks for the article, and keeps asking until you stop getting it wrong.