Sentence of the Day

Ik ben er hard aan aan het werken.

Paging through Teach Yourself Dutch last night, I came across a couple of interesting tidbits that I'd only half remembered. The first was that Dutch, like German, likes to form particle-preposition compounds when the object is inanimate, e.g. Ich arbeite mit ihr "I work with her" vs Ich arbeite damit "I work with it"--even when "it" refers to something grammatically feminine, like die Kamera. Middle English had such compounds, too, but they were eventually lost and are now found only in relics like thereupon and therewith. (Modern Standard German da- represents the same element; darmit is found in earlier stages of the language, but at some point this -r was dropped before consonants.)

Dutch er I'm not so sure about; /d/ in non-initial position does have a tendency to drop out (e.g. goede > goeie, med > mee) and so it's possible er could represent a worn-down counterpart of daar "there". But what really sets apart the Dutch compounds is the overriding tendency to split them in two when certain common adverbs (including negatives like niet and nooit) intervene. So whereas a German words hart daran, a Dutchman works er hard aan.

The other bit I'd forgotten was a Dutch progressive construction consisting of zijn "be" plus aan het INF (e.g. Ik ben aan het werken). Again, there's a parallel in colloquial German, but it's very colloquial, to the point of being widely stigmatised, and rather localised as well; Ich bin am arbeiten would be considered by many a diagnostic feature of Ruhrpott dialect. The normative form is still beim Arbeiten and it's relatively rare, unlike its Dutch counterpart.

As I struggled to fall asleep last night, I naturally found my brain trying to figure out how to combine these two interesting constructions into one utterance. I wasn't sure about the German, but I figured it would be Ich bin hart am arbeiten daran. (Actually, Ich bin hart daran am arbeiten seems also valid and possibly more common, except when the prepositional compound is anticipatory.) What about Dutch? Some Googling provided the answer and you have it before you: lit. "I am 'ere hard on on the working". It's a minor marvel of Franconian syntax.