Frisian has two grammatical genders: common and neuter. Generally, common nouns combine with the determiner de and neuter nouns with the determiner it. When the noun phrase follows a monosyllabic preposition that ends in a non-continuant, the determiners de and it can be replaced with ‘e (Hoekstra & Visser 1996; Popkema 2006: 155). In the case of de, the alternation can be argued to be phonology: ‘e is the phonologically reduced form of de. In the case of it this explanation does not hold. Also, the observation that the alternation only appears after prepositions cannot be accounted for by phonology alone. Interestingly, there also is a difference in interpretation between the two variants of the determiners. In this paper we argue that the difference in Frisian between de and it on the one hand and ‘e on the other hand resembles a similar difference described for German (Schwarz 2009) and for the North Frisian dialect of the island Fering by Ebert (1971a; 1971b): the one between weak and strong determiners.