(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)
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This guy has been doing stupid hair and spewing far right bullshit for longer than trump.
Pretty sure he didn’t blow bubba though.
The difference between grammatical and literal translations is always so funny. Here, let me explain:
Dutch: geef me een klap papa
Norwegian literal: gi meg en klapp, pappa
Nor to English literal: give me a clap, dad
Norwegian situational; smekk meg, far 😏
Nor to English literal: smack me, father 😏
Why can I read that??
As a Norwegian, I understood all but one word.
Was it “dwangwet”? That’s the one word I didn’t understand. (Except for maybe mbt which I think is a misspelling of the Dutch term for “with”)
That was the one. I read the mbt as a similar acronym as in Norwegian, mtp, meaning ‘in regards to’.
Ah, you’re right. According to a random Dutch website it’s short for “met betrekking tot”.
Though to be fair, the matching German abbreviation is “bzgl.” because why use three words when you can just say “regarding”.
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.
Ah, that’s nice to know. Also I finally figured out what “dwangwet” means because for some reason this Reddit post is the top result:
https://old.reddit.com/r/NonPoliticalTwitter/comments/19amlup/dutch_cant_be_a_real_language/
The top comment does seem very slightly familiar. Even the use of brackets wtf
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.
German sounds angry/aggressive to us.
Fair enough. 😥
We have the same experience with Flemish, as you have with our language, by the way.
Flemish sounds funny?
Jullie klinken alsof je constant rochelt terwijl je praat.
Flemish is so much softer, and quite a bit of vocabulary is different, which could lead to confusing situations.
Can’t speak for the Netherlands, but here in Belgium the first thing anyone thinks of when you speak German is the war. I know I’m not supposed to mention it…
That being said, German usually sounds like angry Dutch to us, so I guess we both agree on where we are on the funny-angry spectrum.
Also, most of your examples are more common in the Netherlands, which are definitely further along the funny axis.
But here in Belgium…
Forgive my ignorance, isn’t there a large portion of your countrymen that speak German as one of their primary languages?
It’s a small part on the German border which we got as compensation for WWI. It has a population of roughly 80.000 people, less than 1% of the Belgian population. The two main languages are Dutch (60ish %) and French (40ish %), but German is technically a national language.
I suspect that people in Flanders encounter way more Germans than German-speaking Belgians.
Dutch = Gungan
I’ll never see it any different from now on
Give me a clap Pappa!
i read somewhere that if you only speak english and want to learn another language, then dutch would be the easiest–makes sense now
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.
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.
Wait. How are the Dutch not Gungan again?
