Grammatica - loco

11
Verbs
182
Zij zullen het mij hebben laten zien.
They will have shown it to me.
Note that the auxiliary ‘have’ is rendered by either hebben or zijn depending
on which auxiliary the main verb normally takes in the perfect and pluperfect
tenses, i.e. Hij heeft het gedaan ‘He’s done it’, Zij is naar huis gegaan
‘She has gone home’.
11.1.7
11.1.7.1
Conditional tense
De onvoltooid verleden toekomende tijd—o.v.t.t.
The conditional can be described as the past in the future. It is the tense
that employs ‘would + infinitive’ in English. Just as English uses the past
tense of its future auxiliary ‘will’ to form the conditional, i.e. ‘would’, so
Dutch employs the past tense of zullen, i.e. singular zou, plural zouden.
The gij form is zoudt but this is sometimes used with u, particularly in
inverted constructions to facilitate pronunciation as a liaison is formed
between the dt and the u, e.g. Zoudt u dat willen? ‘Would you want
that?’, but the use of zoudt instead of zou with u sounds rather formal.
Als . . . , dan zou zij hem geloven.
If . . . , (then) she would believe him.
Zij zouden het kopen als . . .
They would buy it, if . . .
11.1.7.2
Zou(den) is also used in Dutch to express ‘was/were going to’, i.e. an
intention to do something that was not fulfilled:
Ik zou vorig jaar naar Duitsland gaan maar . . .
I was going to go to Germany last year but . . .
11.1.7.3
There is one English ‘would’ which is not conditional in meaning and is
not translated by zou(den), i.e. the one that means ‘used to’; the repetitive
nature of the action is not expressed by the verb in Dutch, unlike in
English, but merely by adverbs of time (in the case below by geregeld):