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Talking Dutch

The Dutch disease

I once wrote about tongbrekers, tongue breakers or twisters, and how much fun they can be. Try saying Hottentottententententoonstelling, for example, five times in a row as fast as you can. Hilarious.

It is an artificially compounded word, meaning exhibition of tents of the Hottentots, especially invented to drive you insane. The Dutch language itself is not, but, it turns out, can be just as tonguetwisting.

Philip Ebels
(September 28, 2011)

Wuk dadde?

© Shutterstock

The West Flemish are upset. Their dialect, supposedly spoken in the new TV series Het goddelijke monster (The Divine Monster), an adaptation of Tom Lanoye’s novel of the same title, is being “raped”, according to one linguistics professor. “Or gemassacreerd as we would say,” he continues, massacred. “It hurts the ears of every West Fleming.” The governor of the region said he “was having difficulties watching it until the end”.

To be fair, the production crew of the show, which is set in Kortrijk, did make an effort to get it right. The actors, most of them not native to the region, studied the dialect for months and were schooled by a dialect coach. To no avail. Pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary: They do it all wrong, according to the natives.

Philip Ebels
(September 14, 2011)

Sparkling conversation

Oh what fun, looking for English words of Dutch origin. Especially the dirty ones. You seemed to like it, judging from the amount of tips I received. The word gas, writes Franklin Mamo, which today means the same thing in Dutch as in English (and many other languages), was “created by alchemist Jan van Helmont from Neder-over-Heembeek [district in Brussels] in the 17th century by transliterating into Dutch the Greek word chaos.” Never knew that.

“Americans also like eating cookies, from koekjes” writes Richard Tagart, “They like sitting on the stoop on a balmy evening, from stoep. When there’s a bump in the night, they wonder if the house is haunted by a spook, from spook.” Off to something completely different, though, or we could be sitting here tomorrow, saying things like boss!, from baas, or rucksack!, from rugzak (rug means back, the body part).

(August 30, 2011)

Same difference

Philip Ebels

Frank Vandekerckhove from Las Vegas asks: “Are there any words in our Dutch or Flemish language that are also used in other languages such as French, English or Spanish?”

Well, Frank, I’m glad you asked, because there are plenty – though not all are equally praiseworthy. Apartheid, for example, may very well be the most famous word of the Dutch language. It comes from apart, separate, and the suffix –heid, comparable to the English –hood or –ness.

The second most famous, then, could just as well be polder, “an area of low land reclaimed from a body of water,” according to my Penguin dictionary, “esp in the Netherlands.” To keep those areas water-free, dijken had to be erected, or dykes.

Philip Ebels
(August 17, 2011)

Send me your questions

It is a particularly artsy issue, this week’s Flanders Today. Which is not a crime, considering de zeeën van tijd, the seas of time (an expression used to say a lot of free time), that overwhelm you at the ouset of the summer holidays. You, not me, since our dear hoofdredacteur, head editor or editor-in-chief, is on holiday and has left the rest of our editorial team to fend for ourselves.

Als de kat van huis is, as they used to say in a time when people still used proverbs, dansen de muizen op tafel. When the cat’s away from home, the mice dance on the table (or: When the cat’s away, the mice will play).

Philip Ebels
(July 20, 2011)

Festival fever

It’s official: de zomer is begonnen. Summer has begun. How do I know? Not because school is out and kids run around when they should be doing long division. Not because temperatures are up, and girls look pretty, rosy-cheeked and scantily clad. Not even because I’ve met my next-door neighbour for the first time the other day when we both poked our heads out the window, drawn from our caves by the awakening sounds of life. Hello. – Hello. Beautiful out. – Yup.

No. I know because I can’t stop reading and hearing about zomerfestivals, summer festivals. They’re everywhere, even inside this very newspaper (see agenda). There’s no escaping it. The innocent and unsuspecting citizen may fall victim at any time of day, anywhere, when he least expects it. Standing in line at the supermarket, walking the dog or poking his head out the window, he’ll be deftly reminded of the fact that other, cooler people are having fun somewhere.

Philip Ebels
(July 5, 2011)

Say this five times in a row: De kat krabt de krullen van de trap.

Tongue in a knot? That’s the idea. It is a tongbreker, a tongue twister, and is meant to titillate your speech ability – or to frustrate you to insanity. I used to have a lot of fun as a kid, spending whole afternoons with my classmates repeating phrases like these over and over again as fast as we could until, inevitably, we cracked up. (On rainy Tuesday afternoons, I secretly still do.)

Tongbrekers exist in every language and are of course utter nonsense. The phrase above literally means “The cat claws the curls off the stairs” and has no more meaning than “How much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood?”

Now say this five times in a row, as fast as possible: De knecht snijdt recht en de meid snijdt scheef. (The servant cuts straight, and the maid cuts askew.) Ah, the Dutch language. Such music. Or this: Zeven zwarte zwanen zwemmen in de Zuiderzee. (Seven black swans are swimming in the South Sea.)

Philip Ebels
(June 30, 2011)

Groentjes

I don’t know about you, but I’m staying away from groente, vegetables. Or, as the Flemish like to say, even among adults, groentjes, as if they were something cute and cuddly, like “veggies”. Whenever a stern-looking somebody dressed in white declares on public television that “er absoluut geen reden voor paniek is”, that there is absolutely no reason to panic, I panic.

Cute and cuddly they aren’t, of course, I knew that long before. To call them groentjes is just a trick to make eating them sound like fun. Any kid will testify that it is quite the contrary. They are to humans what water is to cats: unpleasant but necessary. And they’re also very confusing to translate.

Philip Ebels
(June 29, 2011)

'speculaas'

Coming out of the station at Amsterdam Zuid we were greeted by the wonderful smell of speculaas from a nearby baker’s. These gingerbread- like biscuits are instantly recognisable, combining kaneel – cinnamon, nootmuskaat – nutmeg, kruidnagel – cloves, and gember – ginger.

They're associated with the coming of Sinterklaas - Saint Nicholas on 6 December in Belgium, or the evening before in the Netherlands. We mentioned the speculaas smell to our Dutch colleagues, who in typical big-brother style asked: "Hebben jullie ook Sinterklaas? - Do you also have Saint Nicholas?" To which we politely replied, yes.

Alistair MacLean
(December 1, 2010)

'walnoot'

Nuts, I’ve never seen so many nuts as this year. Our eikeboom – oak tree – has finished shedding its thousands of eikels or acorns; shame we don’t keep pigs. Standing unobtrusively a short distance away is another tree. I don’t know where it came from; we certainly didn’t plant it. It’s a walnotenboom, walnut tree, though usually it’s just called een notenboom. And like the eikeboom, it has produced a vast quantity of nuts. Which all means work for me.

The eikels I binned, but I thought I would harvest the walnoten. Backbreaking work, but soon I had filled a pail. Washed and then dried in the oven, they look great in two large bowls. Alas, most are just an empty shell.

A pity, since they are about the best thing to keep you in good shape. With fridges more and more resembling medicine cabinets, noten, and walnoten in particular, really do you good: Die hebben bijzonder veel goede effecten - They have a great many good effects is what a recent article stated.

Alistair MacLean
(October 27, 2010)