If you’ve been reading enough Dutch, you’ll have come across one of the strangest uses of apostrophes and capital letters you’ll have ever seen. ‘s Avonds, and its counterparts for others parts of the day, looks extremely silly, but understanding why we write it down like this is actually quite easy. Let’s see how it works.
‘s Avonds means In the evening, and there’s a few more similar ones you’ll see often-ish:
‘s Morgens (In the morning)
‘s Middags (In the afternoon)
‘s Nachts (At night)
So far, I’ve written them all with a capital letter, but this is only the case when they’re at the beginning of a sentence. But why isn’t the s capitalized instead, and what’s with the apostrophe?
The apostrophe
Let’s start with that last question. The apostrophe in ‘s avonds simply tells us part of a word is left out, just like it often does in English (doesn’t it?). In this case, the entire word is des. Des is an old version of de, one of the two definite articles in Dutch. Back in the days, Dutch, like German, for example, used grammatical cases a lot. I personally couldn’t be happier that we have dropped that habit on most occasions, but it’s still present in some of the older expressions and phrases. And this is one of them.
Des, in this (grammatical) case, means in the or during the, leaving des avonds to mean in the evening. Over the centuries, the des part has been shortened to simply ‘s. Basically, des is a shorter way of saying in the, and ‘s is a shorter way of saying des. Because of these old rules of grammar, the word for evening, avond, gets an extra -s added to it as well, as is the case for the other parts of the day.
The strange capital
With that sorted out, we’re left with the second strange thing about this whole contraption: the oddly placed capital. As per spelling rules all around the world, Dutch sentences also tend to start with a capital letter.
But there’s a bit more to it. The actual rule is that the first full word of a sentence should start with a capital. Because ‘s isn’t considered an actual word, but more of an abbreviation of an article, we don’t upgrade it with a capital letter. The basic rule still applies, though, which means the first actual word of the sentence, in this case avonds, does get a capital letter – but only at the start of a sentence.
Other uses
This happens with timestamps like In the evening, but it also happens on other occasions. For example:
‘s Winters (In winter)
‘s Maandags (During Monday (the days of the week don’t usually get a capital letter in Dutch, but they obviously do at the beginning of a sentence))
It also happens on a few seemingly random other occasions, sometimes when a moment in time is involved, but also when talking about certain places:
‘s Anderendaags ([during] The other day)
‘s Werelds (In the world, as in: ‘s Werelds grootste kasteel / The world’s largest castle)
Most of these other ones are considered fairly archaic or at least somewhat formal, and it’s also common to use something like In de winter in daily life.
Names of cities and towns
There’s one other situation you’ll find this ‘s in, and that’s the names of some cities and villages. Here, too, ‘s means in the, but oftentimes (but not always), a hyphen is added. For example:
‘s-Gravenhage (in the haag of the count, haag meaning something like fenced area, or area with a hedge around it – yes, this is indeed the formal name of Den Haag, or The Hague)
‘s-Hertogenbosch (in the woods of the duke, also known as Den Bosch)
Long story ‘s Hort (kidding, it doesn’t work like that)
When reading a Dutch text, you might well end up very much weirded out by the seemingly random apostrophe at the beginning of a sentence, and the next word starting with a capital letter. While even Dutchies tend to think this looks slightly odd, there’s a perfectly logical explanation for why it happens.
It’s all to do with the ancient, archaic grammatical case and the abbreviation of the article des, and the basic rule that the first full word of a sentence should start with a capital letter, rather than just any old first letter that pops up. And with that, I hope you learned something new about one of ‘s werelds coolest languages.
