Siri reminders in Dutch

As a Dutch person, I'm used to Apple features that have to do with language being later. Siri in English always seems to be more advanced than her Dutch counterpart. But for this post, I wanted to nerd out on how the Dutch grammar itself makes setting a reminder in Siri much harder than it would be in English.

Let's hypothetically say we have a dog and it really really likes apples and we like our dog to have a great time, but we are currently in bed and this downtime has just caused us to realize it has been too long since the last apple and we really love to give our dog one tomorrow. So we say: "hey Siri, remind me to give the dog an apple tomorrow".

In this sentence, it's easy to cut our the piece "give the dog an apple tomorrow". A really smart Siri could parse the word "tomorrow" and add a date to our reminder. Siri usually tries to be smart and ends up cutting that word from the sentence too, and the final thing is a command: "give the dog an apple". It works!

In Dutch, you are out of luck. We have "herinner me aan", and Siri understands that just fine, but it comes with a few twists. The first twist is that it takes a noun, not a verb/sentence. You can say "herinner me aan een appel", but you cannot say ✴︎"herinner me aan geef de hond een appel". You could use the infinitive form of the verb, to make it behave like a noun and end up with "herinner me aan de hond een appel geven", but it feels a bit odd.

The real natural thing to say would be "herinner me eraan dat", and after "dat" you can put a sentence again. Hurray, let's do that then! But unfortunately, Dutch is one of the very few languages that changes its word order around in subordinate clauses. By result of this shuffling, we need a subject again, so we end up with "herinner me eraan dat ik de hond een appel geef". Notice that we are back at the desired "geef" form, but all of the sudden it's at the end of the sentence.

Now for the test, I have given all these sentences to Siri, to see what she ended up with. There is some weird things happening there, and I used ✴︎ to mark things that I find ungrammatical and ~ for things that I find passable.

"herinner me aan een appel" → Appel
✴︎"herinner me aan geef de hond een appel" → ✴︎Aangeeft de hond een appel (fair, both ungrammatical)
~"herinner me aan de hond een appel geven" → De hond een appel geven
"herinner me eraan dat ik de hond een appel geef" → ✴︎Ik de hond een appel geef
"herinner me er morgen aan dat ik de hond een appel geef" → ✴︎Ik de hond een appel geef (scheduled for tomorrow)

I guess the third option is pretty viable, but personally always get confused which of the grammatically correct versions gives me a grammatical correct result. Nowadays, I always use a pause in my speech and dictate after that: "hey Siri, herinner me aan: 'geef de hond een appel'". This gives me the exact word order I want to have, but it is never a natural sentence and it always adds some cognitive overload. Enough to trigger my brain into writing blogposts like these.