January 26th, 2006
Oh I hear you saying it "it took you 4 days to comment on the language?". Good things come to those who wait (or do they, that's a really abitrary expression, it makes no sense). Anywho, time to dive in.
Dutch is like an abused form of Danish. Especially so in speech, but I've noticed that if I can make out a sentence, imagine what it sounds like in speech, then it sounds a little Danish. So to Norwegian it relates as a friend of a friend. In fact, in as much as I can make it out, it makes me want to fix the spelling. One thing that is a serious violation [of what? common sense, clearly] is forgetting to use the verb in a sentence and remembering your mistake right at the end. So some sentences end up like this looking. Ridiculous, isn't it.
One thing that can be amusing is street names and city names. When you hear them spoken, they actually sound kinda cool, like 'Duivendrecht'. But it does make you wonder if they were conceived under the influence of something or other, or if the founders were just very creative.
The phonetics are funny. If you wanna pick up a pack of "Rema boller", they call that 'bol' (I don't even know if that's singular or plural). Only, it's pronounced 'bolh', almost as if you were gagging at the final letter. In fact, while the the words are not terribly different conceptually, they are incredibly obfuscated. 'utydelig' ['unclear'] becomes 'onduidelijk'. It's like they made a point of adding more letters [French, anyone?] and changing the ending. Lingual camouflage?
Get uit.
We like to show off, what can I say.
Oh and about the relation to French; you can thank Napoleon for that one. That's why this morning, I 'vond een cadeau op mijn bureau dat parfum bleek te zijn'
Erik, the French heritage in our language doesn't exactly come from Napoleon. But from the 'Pruikentijd' (the era when people were afraid of water and therefor didn’t wash themselves but instead threw loads of perfume on them and preferred to disguise their hair under awful white wigs), when it became a fashion to speak French. So that's why many French words were added to the Dutch vocabulary.
Haha, you just got taken to school, Erik :D
Shame, that just destroyed what I believed to be Napoleon's only accomplishment :D
Not for us, we played for Napoleon in order to get rid of the pesky Russians who loitered around and overstayed their welcome. Well, not just them in fact, Germans and Austrians were just as bad.
Well, Erik to comfort you: If it weren't for Napoleon, the Dutch would have never used family names (achternamen) until recently. It was Napoleon who introduced this for he obligated everyone to just pick a name. ;)
Oh this just keeps getting better. :D Diana, don't leave please :D
lol :D
[6] So Napoleon is the reason I got made fun of at school? Booo :D
lol Yes, you can all blame it on Napoleaon :D