 |
 |
 |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|||
  In
this IssueContributorsLetters
to the EditorWrite
to UsSpread
the WordBack
Issues
COLUMNS
|
 |
The title of the article was the punchline in a series of advertisements that appeared in a Dutch newspaper in the late 1990s. The company was Dutch and so, presumably, were all its customers — as well as all the people who read the adverts. So why, English speakers might ask, should the punchline have been in English at all? More to the point, what was it supposed to mean? Probably neither of these questions would have occurred to Dutch speakers, who are now quite used to seeing English words and phrases in almost every advertisement they come across — not to mention in the titles of many Dutch TV programmes (All you need is love, Get the picture, The soundmix show) and the songs sung by most Dutch pop groups. The advantage of this all-pervading presence of English is that Dutch speakers are familiar with an increasingly wide range of English words and phrases. The disadvantage is that they are led to think all the English they come across in the Netherlands is good English. The normal — indeed only — Dutch word for sales manager is salesmanager, invariably written as one word, like the now equally Dutch terms airconditioning and helpdesk. The reason they are written as one word is that in Dutch, as in most Germanic languages, a pair of nouns in which the first (sales, air, help) qualifies the second (manager, conditioning, desk) is written as a single word. Dutch spelling manuals advise readers to apply the same rule to combinations of English words that are commonly used in Dutch — hence salesmanager, airconditioning, helpdesk, peptalk, diskjockey, powerplay and so on. Unfortunately people then tend to apply the same rule even when writing in English: hotelreservations, traintickets, productmanager, boardingpass, etc. British and American English blends Another feature of English as used in Dutch is that the distinction between British and American English is not always recognised or applied. Occasionally this results in hybrid terms or spellings that are only found in the Netherlands, such as stationcar (a cross between station wagon and estate car) and tyrecenter (both again written as one word). But it is not simply a question of spelling. Dutch is so similar to English in pronunciation, vocabulary and word order that Dutch speakers can sometimes translate entire Dutch sentences literally, simply changing one or two vowel sounds, and produce faultless, or almost faultless, English. There is then a great temptation to think that this is always so. However, English differs from Dutch (and often every other European language) in a number of important respects, which Dutch speakers tend to overlook. The English words actual, eventual, control and scheme differ in meaning from their apparent direct equivalents in every other European language: Dutch actueel means current; Dutch eventueel means possible or any; Dutch controle means check; and Dutch schema means diagram. Apart from these classic European 'false friends', Dutch has quite a few of its own: secuur means meticulous; informeren means to inquire; stretcher means camp bed; and folder means leaflet/brochure. Again, the distinction that English makes between its two main past tenses (the Open and Closed Past, traditionally known as the Present Perfect and Past Simple) is virtually unknown in other languages and is a constant stumbling block for Dutch speakers, who tend to overuse the Open Past as the following examples illustrate: I have seen him yesterday. Have you been in Greece last year? When has that happened? In some cases considerable misunderstandings may arise. This is illustrated by another typical mistake Dutch speakers make. A Dutch speaker who asks an English speaker How long are you here? (but means How long have you been here?) may be disconcerted to receive the reply Another two weeks (rather than Since last week). In English you say Birmingham Station, London International Film Festival, but the word order in Dutch is precisely the opposite: Station Utrecht, Internationaal Filmfestival Rotterdam. However, the latter festival is never known by this name even in Holland, for the organizers have decided it should have a cosmopolitan English title. Simple, they must have thought — just drop the last a in Internationaal and Bob's your uncle: International Filmfestival Rotterdam! With place names the meaning is still usually clear, but in other cases serious confusion may arise, particularly since many English nouns can also be interpreted as verbs. A good example is address website (address it as what?) instead of website address. Dutch speakers are not always aware that their own words for bring and take are used rather differently from their apparent English equivalents. A Dutch-speaking Martian landing on Earth would utter the equivalent of Bring me to your leader rather than Take me to your leader. Again, if you hear a Dutch speaker say We're taking a dog or Do you take a beer?, you may be inclined to ask Where?, but the Dutch speaker will almost certainly mean We're getting ourselves a dog or Are you having a beer? and again be disconcerted by your answer. There is a tendency among Dutch speakers to assume that whatever works in Dutch will also work in such a supposedly easy language as English. A case in point is abbreviations. The Dutch expression onder andere(n), equivalent to among others/other things, is usually abbreviated to its initial letters (o.a.). As a result, Dutch speakers often use the abbreviation a.o. (= among others) when writing in English, and are surprised to find that English speakers have no idea what it means. Again, we recently came across a Dutch firm that repeatedly used the mysterious abbreviation u/i in its technical drawings. When we asked about this, we were told that it meant up to and including! Dutch has a nice short expression for this, tot en met, which is commonly abbreviated to t/m — so the company, assuming that any Dutch abbreviation must have an English equivalent, simply invented one, complete with forward slash. In fact, they may even have copied u/i from texts produced by other Dutch companies. Just as English speakers say they know their ABC, the Dutch characteristically say that they know their languages, and are apt to assume that English written by Dutch speakers is just (or almost) as reliable as that produced by native speakers. Dutch speakers are therefore less inclined than they might be to check the quality of the English they produce, and the results are sometimes absurd. A striking example is the slogan referred to in the title of this article: We put the top on the job. Dutch has an expression iemand aan de slag krijgen, meaning something like 'to get someone on the job/get someone working'. The Dutch word top, apart from meaning the tip or summit of something, can also mean the top people. In this case a temping agency was claiming it was the best place for people with a university education (= the top) to find jobs. In Dutch the slogan would probably have read Wij krijgen de top aan de slag, literally We get the top (people) on the job/working. Sensing that get would not do here, the company replaced it with put and assumed it had done all that was necessary to produce a punchy international slogan: We put the top on the job. Interestingly enough, when we phoned the company to point out that this was meaningless to English speakers and to find out what they had really meant to say, the person we spoke to seemed unperturbed. The words were English, they probably made some sort of sense to Dutch people, and that was all that mattered. If this were all, one might merely shrug one's shoulders. Yet the Dutch are sufficiently impressed by their own ability in English for the government to have seriously considered making English the sole medium of Dutch higher education. Although the average Dutch speaker is remarkably competent in English compared with people in most other countries, we believe there is still a long way to go before such a drastic step could possibly be taken. As things now stand it would have a serious adverse impact on the quality of Dutch education — quite apart from the damage it would do to the status of the Dutch language both at home and abroad. To alert Dutch speakers to the risks described above,
while helping them raise the standard of their English even further, the
authors decided some years ago to write a book called Eindelijk
Engels! (English at Last!). The book was published in 2003
and is available from Kemper Conseil Publishing (ISBN 90 76542 430), Dr.
Beguinlaan 72, Voorburg, Netherlands (e-mail kemperconseil@dataweb.nl,
website www.kemperconseil.com). On this page, you can find a list of some common false friends between Dutch and English. |
|
 |
|||
