(Screenshot of a social media post, user posting an image of Jar Jar Binks with a speech bubble for the post replied to. Post is from a Dutch politician stating "We hebben een serieus probleem met de politieke ontwikkelingen mbt de dwangwet en ik hoop dat dat de komende dagen kan worden opgelost. ")
Also, who can forget this favorite
(Screenshot of a translator app.
English: spank me daddy.
Dutch: geef me een klap papa)
I'm Deutsch and to me Dutch sounds really funny. Even a harmless word like "ontwikkelingen". Not to speak of "Grachten" (said correctly), Pindakaas and Poffertjes. Lekker! I wonder if the opposite applies, too.
BTW, Geert Wilders deserves all the ridicule he gets, and more.
While "met betrekking tot" is pretty archaic in and of itself, the shorter "betreffende" sounds even more archaic. I think a more commonly used word in daily speech would be "over".
Word for word, 'met betrekking tot' is directly something like 'med betraktning for' = 'with consideration towards' in modern language, while the modern Norwegian version of the same is 'med tanke på' = 'with thought on'.
Meaning the same, but the old one sounds archaic, from the time when Norwegian had formal and informal language, like most languages still has, but that somehow disappeared gradually after the war, to the degree that we now often sound rude.
The abbreviation written out, my translation would have been word for word, and not guesswork.
I know Dutch and Norwegian are very similar grammatically, so I'd assume it is the same in that using just the word for 'regarding' would just not make any grammatical sense, hence why we have the acronym.
Simplification without simplifying anything, now that is efficient simplicity.
English and Dutch are cousin languages who are relatively close by Germanic standards, though if you want a real mind fuck listen to or read Frisian. Also the old Runic alphabet for the Lowlands and England are called anglo-frisian runes.
I was told dutch is one of the hardest languages to learn. Lots of meaningless words are often used to pad a sentence which in essence can be left out.
Zou het misschien een beetje mogelijk zijn om iets te doen?
Zou het mogelijk zijn om iets te doen?
Same thing
Was made aware of this by a dutch teacher and never looked the same at how we construct sentences. The words are added for a perceived kindness, but confuse non native speakers.
Seems like bullshit. If they don't have much meaning, you can essentially ignore them. No way that's harder than learning Chinese or most other non-European languages for native English speakers.
I have heard before that, regardless of pronunciation, not using such pointless words really makes a foreign speaker stand out.
Yeah, you can convey yourself just fine, but it is noticeable.
Oh, no. Certainly. It's just interesting to me that it's those "inefficiencies" which make the language sound so much more natural, regardless of accent/pronunciation.
The easiest would probably be Frisian. Not that useful, though. Though learning Dutch isn't that useful, either, if you already speak English - most people in the Netherlands can speak English, and they have a lot more practice with it than someone who starts learning Dutch on a whim.
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